Dean Stevenson's Resume and Experience



Assessment ChartClass DiscussionQuestioningOverview: An informal assessment strategy where students are asked questions to show their knowledge of a topic. Types of questions include engaging (get students to discuss), refocusing (help students get back on track), and clarifying (making student language more precise/clear).Important Feature(s): Questions can be used orally or on paper. Questions can (and should be) used for any math topic.Advantages: Very open form of assessment because questions can take on any form and can be used in any situation. Gives the teacher tons of information on student thinking.Disadvantages: When used in discussion, teachers must remember which students contribute answers and the quality of the answer. The teacher must work to use “good” questions and can easily point students towards the answer the teacher is looking for.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Questioning is by far one of the best assessment strategies because it is quick and can be used in any context. When teachers use questions effectively, it allows students to learn mathematics deeper and gives them the opportunity to feel that they developed the concepts on their own.InterviewsOverview: An informal assessment strategy that allows students to show their mathematical thinking by direct conversation with the teacher.Important Feature(s): Direct communication between the teacher and the student.Advantages: The teacher is able to hear the process which students used to come to an answer. It allows students to practice communicating their mathematics precisely.Disadvantages: This strategy is time consuming because it involves class time and is usually done on an individual basis.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: In theory, interviews are the best assessment strategy because it allows the teacher and student to work one-on-one and develop the student’s mathematical abilities. In practice, due to the overwhelming amount of time that interviews consume, they must be used less frequently than they should. Group Work DiscussionOverview: As students work in groups, the teacher listens to conversations that are taking place and provides appropriate feedback when necessary.Important Feature(s): Peer discussion allows the teacher to listen to students in a “natural setting.”Advantages: Cooperative learning allows students to enhance their critical thinking skills and develop multiple approaches to the concepts. Teachers are able to see which students have the ability to communicate math concepts to their peers and which students need assistance in their work.Disadvantages: With any sort of group work in secondary classes, students are bound to get off topic and work may not be completed as efficiently. This puts more pressure on the teacher to create engaging tasks so that students remain on topic.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Listening to group work discussions is a great informal assessment strategy because it gives the teacher insight into how students work with similarly able peers. This will be different than how the student works with the teacher and will give new insight to students’ abilities.HomeworkOverview: Homework is an assessment strategy that can be used both informally and formally. This strategy involves students doing work at home to either help develop mathematical concepts or reinforce them. Important Feature(s): Homework is done outside the math classroom. Homework falls into three categories: open, open-middled, and closed.Advantages: This strategy is extremely helpful in giving the teacher insight into how well students understand math concepts. Disadvantages: Since this is done outside the classroom, many equity problems come into play, including family contribution to homework assignments, access to technologies and resources, and personal life problems. Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Homework is an assessment strategy that can be beneficial if used appropriately. The traditional homework approach of drilling procedures through multiple questions does not engage students and shows very little to the teacher about conceptual understanding. If real-world problems are incorporated and engaging assignments are created, homework can be very useful.Quizzes“Normal” QuizzesOverview: A formal assessment strategy, a “normal” quiz is an in-class assessment that covers less material than a test and is also usually worth less of the students’ final grade.Important Feature(s): Students are given an opportunity to show the teacher their understanding of the concepts in the assessment.Advantages: Students are required to understand the material that is being completed on the quiz and must use their knowledge to arrive at correct solutions. This strategy allows the teacher to see how well their lessons have taught the students.Disadvantages: Students can feel pressured by this type of assessment. Quizzes can be bias in their questions and can influence what students view is important to learn if not created properly.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Quizzes are a great tool for teachers to check where students are weakest in the concepts being covered. Since quizzes are used on less material than a test, it gives the teacher more of an opportunity to go back and re-teach topics that students are struggling with. Teachers must be careful, though, and be sure to make their quizzes cover material similar to the way they have been instructed.Cooperative QuizzesOverview: This is a quiz in which students are put into pairs and allowed to work on the material together.Important Feature(s): Though students work in pairs, they are to turn in individual work. This holds both students accountable for the work.Advantages: In most classrooms where discussion and group work are a big part of the curriculum, this allows quizzes to align better with the instruction seen in the classroom. This also allows the teacher to use more complex problems and see the problem solving abilities of the students.Disadvantages: Students may feel they have been “slighted” by their pairing. Also, one student may dominate doing the work and the other student receives the same grade as long as they write down the work.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Cooperative (partner) quizzes are a great assessment strategy because they allow students to be assessed in a way that aligns with the way they have been taught. The biggest concern with these quizzes is that students/parents may feel that something worth a large percent of the student’s grade should not depend on someone else. TestsStandardized TestsOverview: Standardized tests are a formal assessment where students are tested on the material they are supposed to have learned throughout the entire year. Important Feature(s): Students are not allowed to go to the next math class until they pass this exam. These tests are multiple choice.Advantages: These types of tests allow for students to be assessed and compared to students across the entire state.Disadvantages: These high stakes tests usually focus on procedural knowledge. On top of this, students feel extremely pressured by the test and may have anxiety, causing them not to do as well as they could. These tests also cause for many teachers to avoid teaching mathematics in depth and focus on the questions they believe will be on the test.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Standardized tests are a form of assessment that seem great in theory, but are not as good in practice. Due to their basis in procedures, students do not have to critically think about the math. The pressure felt by these tests forces curriculum to be altered to teach to the test and students who do not perform well under pressure will be less motivated. “Normal” TestsOverview: Normally at the end of a chapter or unit, tests are a formal assessment that covers the math concepts of the material in that chapter or unit and is usually worth a large percent of a student’s grade.Important Feature(s): Tests cover the most material of any sort of assessment outside of maybe projects.Advantages: Tests show the teacher the amount of knowledge students retained about the material and sees if the students can use critical thinking skills to solve problems in a variety of contexts.Disadvantages: Just like standardized tests, these tests can also invoke a sense of pressure with students and can cause anxiety. Depending on the types of questions asked, tests may not cohere with the type of instruction students are used to seeing.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Tests can be a great tool if they are used appropriately. Tests should not only be assessment for the student, but also a learning experience. If done appropriately, tests allow teachers to see how well students can make connections between mathematical concepts and use critical thinking skills to come to correct solutions.RubricsOverview: Rubrics are a way of assessing many of the other strategies listed in this chart. By breaking down a task into its important components, rubrics allow the teacher to standardize how tasks are graded, even if the task is very open and responses vary greatly.Important Feature(s): Rubrics can vary in complexity and can be used in many different ways depending on the math task.Advantages: The flexibility of a rubric allows for any task to be analyzed as deeply as the teacher desires. A rubric is also a great way to show students what is expected of them in a task.Disadvantages: If the teacher is not careful in the design of a rubric, a rubric can skew what is important for the students to learn due to what is worth more on the sheet. This is also something that can be time consuming to develop depending on the complexity of the rubric.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Rubrics are one of the best tools in assessing any task. Though not that useful in simple tasks, as things become more complex and students have a greater ability to vary responses, rubrics help teachers ensure they do not bias their grades on things such as projects, tests, and quizzes. The only problem with rubrics is that they are hard to develop so they take time to get exactly right.ProjectsOverview: This is an assessment strategy that has students develop mathematical concepts through a larger assignment. In projects, students must call upon mathematical knowledge and make connections between concepts and relate it to real life situations.Important Feature(s): Projects usually take both class time and time at home. Advantages: Students can see many real-world applications of mathematics through the use of projects. Projects are made in a way that it allows for students to use multiple approaches and use a variety of strategies, allowing teachers to see how students view the problems at hand.Disadvantages: Projects can have equity issues if done at home, because of access to technology, family contributions, and personal factors.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Projects seem to be a great assessment tool that can be used in place, or hand in hand, with tests. By using projects, students will begin to see the connections between math and other subject areas and it gives the teacher great insight into how students are thinking.Writing PromptsEntry/Exit SlipsOverview: Entry slips are used to see what students know coming into a lesson through a writing prompt and exit slips are used to see what students have learned from a lesson.Important Feature(s): Written in a quick amount of time. The slip should relate to the lesson at hand.Advantages: These writing prompts are extremely time efficient and are like having impersonal interviews with every student in the class. It allows the teacher to see where students stand coming into a lesson and/or after completing a lesson.Disadvantages: Students may not take these slips seriously due to the inability to truly grade them and this may lead to little information on student understanding.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: These slips are definitely worth their time considering they should take less than two or three minutes to complete. In that amount of time, if the slip is well planned, it should give insight to the teacher on every student’s understanding of the topic. Assessing these should be informal, though, due to their nature and quickness.JournalsOverview: Much like an entry/exit slip, journal prompts ask students to communicate mathematical ideas/questions through a writing prompt.Important Feature(s): Longer than an entry/exit slip. The journal prompt must be more than a procedural reproduction (give students something open to discuss).Advantages: Students have the ability to show the teacher their understanding of a concept by communicating it using written language. Teachers can see if students are truly grasping a concept or if they strictly know how to use the algorithm because many journal prompts ask for explanation of ideas.Disadvantages: Students may believe journals are not a part of mathematics because they involve writing and, in turn, not take them seriously. Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Journals should be an assessment tool used in a math classroom. As stated above, interviews are time consuming, but this is a close alternative that allows students to express their thinking on paper and makes them really think through mathematical ideas. Journal prompts, though, must be well-thought out or they will not induce any sort of important information for the teacher.Gallery WalkOverview: In this assessment tool, different concepts are listed on different papers and, in groups, students are asked to contribute whatever they know about that concept by writing those things on the paper. After all groups have done all of the different concepts, students are to go back and read through what the other groups contributed.Important Feature(s): Practically a group discussion but focused on specific concepts.Advantages: This allows for cooperative learning and allows for the entire class to learn from one another without having a class-wide discussion. Since students are in smaller groups, everyone is more likely to speak up and the teacher will be able to see where a wider range of the students are on the concepts used.Disadvantages: Since these are used more for concepts and less for problem solving, students are being asked for characteristics more than they are being asked to use critical thinking skills. This may only show the teacher what students remember about the concept.Personal Reflection on Usefulness: Gallery walks can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a unit, to see where students stand on the concepts that are to be covered through the unit. Using these is a great way to have students bounce ideas off one another in a comfortable environment. ................
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