Informal Assessments
Throughout all of my practicums, I engaged in many informal assessments with students such as observing them in their natural environments. While they engaged with peers, problem solved and worked in groups with their team members. I also would pull students during the soft start mornings to give them feedback on their KWL charts. If I noticed they did not elaborate in their answer, I would ask them more questions and have them write a more detailed response. During writing time, I would give students feedback on their grammar and sentence structure.
Formative Assessments
There was a lot of formative assessments during the units being taught. The beginning and middle lessons all incorporated formative assessments such as small group discussions, class discussions, worksheets and the KWL charts. The students were not familiar with the KWL charts, however, after I explained them, they remembered what to do the next time we completed this chart for our social studies unit.
Summative Assessments
For my summative assessments I had the students complete a variety of tasks that were able to show me their level of understanding of the content. For example, for math, I had created worksheets for rounding to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 which would show me where each student was at. There were a couple students that were struggling with the concepts so they pulled aside to work with the EA in a small group. I also spent a few of the soft start mornings, to support the students needing a little more support with understanding the math concepts of rounding. If there was any extra time throughout the day, I would pull the students to the circle table and work with them more. I think this was helpful as they were able to catch up and understand the concepts with more frequent practice in the day.
For career education, the students created their now personal collages with magazines and had to present to the class. Students were able to display parts of their personality, their interests and their goals on their collages which was the learning intention.
I had some worksheets where the students reflected on the lesson. There were a few questions related to what they had just learned it was an “exit slip”. I also did this with sticky notes where the students would answer the question and put it on the correct question bubble on the white board. I noticed that majority of the students wrote well thought out responses to the questions and were able to understand the concepts that were intended for the learning intention.