Assessment

Through a solid balance of formative and summative assessments, the teacher will evaluate student growth and progress. Through multiple forms of assessment data, the teacher will engage learners in multiple ways of demonstrating knowledge and assessing said knowledge.   Then, through independent and collaborative methods, the teacher can assess said evaluations for performance data on each student.

Data Driven Instruction

I implement instruction for each student based data from assessments. This data comes from multiple sources, though the most prominent would be the formal assessments of students understanding such as snapshots. One way in which I demonstrate using data driven instruction would be through determining the students current orthographic level and adjusting content accordingly. Using screenings from Kathy Gansky’s Word Journeys text, students were screened and then given a further level feature assessment to identify the students specific struggles. This data was implemented to not only address the student’s specific orthographic level, but also to give assignments that specifically target the individual skills within this orthographic level that the student was misusing. 

Pre & Post Tests

Unit pre & post assessments are delivered at the beginning and end of each section of conent. These unit tests consist of released SOL questions from previous years and were typically a more difficult assessment than the weekly assessments, but helped to show data and preparedness for the end of year assessments. The Pre test data is then reviewed to see what each student already knows and what needs to be taught. After the unit, the post test data is reviewed to check for understanding and then compared against the pretest data to see what the student learned during the unit. I implemented these assessments into every unit that I teach, but I find them to be especially effective during the SOL review units from previous grades. When teaching my 5th grade Science class the 4th grade review SOLs I was able to implement a pretest before the unit to see what exactly students remembered correctly in order to create effective instruction that was able to reteach forgotten content with a specific focus on the overall gaps in understanding. 

Daily Check-Ins

In addition to summative assessments, formative assessment information is gathered on a daily basis through the usage of In&Out Tickets and through the questions that are asked at the end of each activity check-in in order to discern each student’s progress through the content unit. The image to the right shows a daily activity graph with times. After each section, the teacher stops and refocuses by asking what was learned and why the content is applicable.