MIAA 330 Reflection

Donna Robertson
1/29/15

In what ways will I be able to use assessments to inform and guide

students with their own understanding of their math skills?

During this course, I have found multiple ways in which to use

assessments to inform and guide students with their own understanding of
their math skills. The course began with ways to construct authentic
assessments. Of the three types of test responses (selected, constructed, and
extended), the most frequently used is the selected. However, it actually
gives the least amount of evidence of a students learning. As I stated in my
presentation, The easier to grade, the less you find out. The more
challenging and time consuming to grade, the more you find out. I have
been gradually adding more and more constructed and extended response
questions to my assessments of my third grade students. Not only does this
provide me with much more evidence of their learning, but it also increases
their ability to show what they have learned and helps them to synthesize

that knowledge. This also increases the rigor of the assessments, and the
students will be facing very rigorous SBAC testing soon.
Authentic assessments have a strong sense of purpose. They are
constructed with a specific goal in mind and provide needed information to
guide instruction.
In this course, we have practiced error analysis with students across
the grade spans. With the help of others in this cohort, I have been able to
evaluate errors from second, third, fifth, seventh, and eighth grades. Even
though the students ages ranged from 7 to 14, one common theme was
found. The students were unsure of what they knew and confused in their
explanations of their procedures. I feel that as our district continues our
implementation of the Common Core State Standards, this weakness should
dissipate to some extent since the ability to express proof and evidence of
ones answers is key in these standards.
We have also learned the concept of learning trajectories. These are
the paths of learning for students in a specific topic or domain. They include
a mathematical goal, the levels of thinking needed to achieve this goal, and
the activities needed to teach toward this goal. Along with others in this
cohort, we prepared a learning trajectory in the domain of geometry for
Kindergarten through Eighth Grades.

During the portion of the course when we explored assessment

outcomes for all students, I read and summarized an article from Education
Week written by Anthony Rebora entitled Common-Core Math Standards
Put New Focus on English-Learners. The author chronicled the
experiences of a New York City middle school math teacher who found that
the English Learner students werent scoring as well on unit assessments as
the English only students. He worked to solve this disparity by including
language arts strategies into his math lessons and made sure to have specific
language objectives in his math lessons. The standards for practice included
in the Common Core Math Standards require the students to explain their
solutions, argue incomplete findings of other students, and critique their
reasoning. These high level thinking and expressive skills can be especially
challenging for those still learning English as their second language.
Another aspect of the MIAA 330 course was looking at class, school,
and district assessment data and creating a curriculum plan based on this
data. Finding, collecting, and sharing the data was challenging but quite
informative. One piece of data I found was especially interesting to me.
About one-fifth of the students parents did not graduate high school. At our
school, we try to instill the idea that they are all scholars and life-long
learners. We celebrate their successes on the walls of our cafeteria, where

we also have a large amount of college banners around the room. Perhaps
our strategies will help to break the cycle of a lack of a diploma in these
families.
I appreciate the content of this course and the amount of modeling of
effective teaching strategies provided by our instructor and my cohorts.