Monday, May 19, 2014

End of Year Assessments: The Standards Based Report Card

Below is a share copy of an end-of-year math assessment that
reflects the CCSS standards listed on students' standards based report cards. 
Our system moved to a standards based report card based with prioritized standards from the CCSS. As the year draws to a close, I will give a number of end-of-year assessments to get a benchmark related to students' overall concept, skill, and knowledge for each of the standards. I will couple these benchmark scores with formative assessment observations, scores, and efforts from the past term when marking the student progress report. Further, the information will come in handy as I make suggestions for summer study, and as I share information with next year's teachers related to students' needs and priorities.

How will I create and give these assessments?

Today, we'll start with a Google Form Math Assessment that is based on all the CCSS report card standards.  The assessment form is mainly multiple choice or short answer, however I'll give students a hard copy to to use as they work out more complex problems and operations.  I'll collect the hard copy, and refer to it when students get problems wrong to understand the need.

Later in the week I'll use That Quiz to assess students' fact skill for each operation as well as enrichment facts such as algebraic equations and other number knowledge facts. I'll also take a look at their problem solving efforts and abilities.

With regard to ELA, I'll use students' winter narrative work, current endangered species project work, and some discrete skill tests.

When standardized scores come in a few months after the progress reports, I'll compare those scores with the home grown standards tests I'm giving now to make sure there's a correlation.  If there's not a correlation, I'll look a bit more deeply.

Woven in and around the tests will be students' end-of-year study of endangered species PBL, plate tectonics, coding, river habitats, and the traditional attention to reading, writing, and math.

What do your end-of-year assessments look like?  How do they inform your work completing progress reports and report cards?  Do they match-up with standardized tests? And, how do you balance this testing with more comprehensive, engaging, hands-on, interdisciplinary learning.  These are all questions that teachers consider at the end of the year and throughout the year.