Focus Area 5.1 Assess Student Learning
Develop, select and use informal and formal, diagnostic, formative and summative assessment strategies to assess student learning.
Assessment is an essential tool to monitor students progress in their learning. It allows teachers to gain understanding of where students are at, what they have successfully learnt, where they are still struggling and to help plan where the teachers need to go next. Prior to starting off a unit on 'Adaptations', students were asked to write down what they thought adaptations were, to allow me time to plan the start of the unit based on where the students were at. For the students formative tasks, they were each provided with an information sheet on various animals or plants, and were asked to underline the adaptations that the particular animal had, and create a small poster based on the information they had found. To cater for all students, I often gave out the sheets myself, to allow students who had lower levels in reading to be able to understand and read most of what was given to them. From here I would provide them with feedback on if they were discovering the adaptations of the animal/plant or other facts on them. Once students began to understand what the features of certain animals and plants were to help them survive, I asked students to pick any animal of their choice, and research it. In this project they had to create one larger poster telling me about their chosen animal, however we emphasized that the main component of the assignment was them finding the animals adaptations. They used books, information sheets and Ipads to collect and find information. During this time they had allocated to do the big poster, I would have individual check in meetings with students, to go through the rubric and checklist provided to them, to highlight where they have achieved the success criteria, where they are struggling and to answer any other questions they might have. From here I was able to write down feedback notes to them to help them either improve their work, or move on to the next section after being stuck. To conclude the unit, I finished off with a question sheet (see attached), which asked them to answer a small variety of questions, showing me their understandings. The question sheet included questions where they could use the information from both the mini posters and the main posters to answer the questions.
Feedback from the students were all positive, as they had quoted thing such as (see below on sticky notes) " the mini posters helped me with my big ones", " the posters helped me answer the test questions". To ensure student anonymity, I used sticky notes with numbers on them rather than students writing their names.
1.5, 2.2, 2.6, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.2, 5.2
Feedback from the students were all positive, as they had quoted thing such as (see below on sticky notes) " the mini posters helped me with my big ones", " the posters helped me answer the test questions". To ensure student anonymity, I used sticky notes with numbers on them rather than students writing their names.
1.5, 2.2, 2.6, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.2, 5.2
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