B1+FIAE+Chapter+3


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Abstract:
This chapter focuses heavily on the idea of assessment. The author stresses that teachers should be spending focus on the summative assessment and formative assessments. Also, that we use what the formative assessments tell us about the students' mastery. With formative assessments we can see in advance what students need work on. As educators, we want to see mastery in the work and giving meaningless assessments throughout and one large summative assessment at the end does not accurately measure the students' mastery. Mel Christensen said, on assessments, that, “Assessments should reflect what students have been taught, learned, and mastered rather than what they can memorize or produce on the spot. If students are engaged in class and still do not know what they will be assessed on, it reflects a lack of focus in the curriculum and on the part of the instructor.” An assessment should not take a student off guard, rather #|confirm that they have mastered the knowledge. The formative assessments help along the way by giving educators forsight about what needs more coverage, and what students have already mastered. The author instead offers a three #|step model. Wormelli encourages teachers to **pre-assess** students on how much they know before starting to teach them. This will give the teacher a good sense of where the unit needs to go. Why teach something all the students have already mastered? As a second step, the author suggests formative assessments as forms of positive feedback along the way of learning. Last, he offers summative assessment that would formalize all the knowledge.

Synthesis:
This chapter put into perspective how much the class was bothered by the idea of not utilizing the information taken from assessments. Each class member stated that they want to make assessments fair for their students in various ways. Class members made personal references to experiences that they had either taking assessments or with giving them in the field. Class mates felt that the summative assessment should really just be used to confirm the mastery of the unit instead of actually testing it. The feedback from the formative assessments are to be used to guide the learning of the students, not just busy work. A concern that was raised by a couple of classmates was the idea of gibing students a copy of the summative assessment at the beginning of the unit. Classmates felt that by giving the students this copy will only show that the students can memorize what they need to know and recite it when test time comes. Other students did not address this concern in their response, but there are other types of **[|summative assessment]** ideas out there for teachers who do not feel comfortable giving out their final exam at the beginning of the unit.

Paul Santamore
Assessment through differentiation is the topic of chapter three and I see it as the most integral section of education. The book basically states that if one cannot assess their students and themselves then there is not much room for growth and improvement as an educator. Assessment must start with watching the student in class or observing what they do that is good and what is counterproductive as well. Examination is also necessary rather than making a quick diagnosis or the students abilities or understanding of the topic. We as teachers must develop the curriculum so that our students can be assessed frequently and differently each time. If we fail to assess them correctly then they will not pick up on the information correctly and their learning may be hindered greatly. When I have my own classroom I will assess fairly. To be fair I will set expectations early and often in order to provide the students with a target for their understanding. Before any formal assessment takes place I must look at each of them and see where they are starting. If a student has no base from which to begin learning, how will they ever master the information? Varying assessment is something that I mentioned above that is necessary in order to give my students a chance to succeed in areas unfamiliar to them; this will help to broaden their horizons as a learner. Lastly, I will assess regularly in order to provide my students with feedback and positive reinforcement.

Leigh Welch
This chapter had various forms of information in it, assessments, differentiated instruction, and determining readiness were only a few of the topics. This chapter goes into depth on assessment and how it should be used in the classroom. You should give pre-assessments, then formative assessments, and then tie it all off with summative assessments. This concept was relatively self-explanatory, but it did go into greater depth, which was very informative. The book talked a lot about how assessments are good but that they do not mean anything if we, as teachers, do not act from them. Assessments are great but they should be used as tools to see where you are as a teacher, and where your students are, when it comes to the subject area. I had never realized how much assessments bothered me when the information gathered from them was not used to better the class or myself in any way, especially with pre-assessments. If you are going to gather information as a teacher on your students then you should think of that information is gold; a lifeline. There are many ways to use this information, seating arrangements, group projects, what content to teach, student’s prior knowledge, etc. I also liked that the chapter gave specific examples for the topic that related to math. This did not happen with the other books. It comes in handy when I am trying to wrap my mind around a concept within my content area when an example of exactly that is giving within the text.

Bianca Stoutamyer
After being in the classroom for two days I have seen the use of different types of assessments for students. Examples of these assessments include drawing up graphs as a pre-assessment to a lab that acted as a formative assessment for their mastery. As a future science teacher I would approach my lessons in this same manner or in the same manner as Moosa Shah. Assessing the student’s mastery to me is not asking them multiple-choice questions about vocabulary words it is about seeing how they use their knowledge in a situation that requires it. Labs are the perfect way for this to occur. The idea given in the book of giving the students a copy of the upcoming test and letting them see what questions you will answer while you teach the lesson is not one I will ever use in my classroom. Yes, I will give students the knowledge of what material is important to know for the upcoming test but to me giving them the actual test isn’t showing that they truly learned mastery of the subject but that they learned how to memorize the answers and recite them back during the actual exam. Another portion I liked was to avoid the fluff assignments. Throughout my education I have done my fair share of useless assignments that are not challenging and that I learn nothing from. I want to avoid those with my students by giving them assignments that challenge them but also are fun and diverse. I agree with the author that all students get out of fluff assignments is how to “tie a toga”, or copy information on to a poster.

Carinne Haigis
The goal of this chapter was to show how to effectively create and administer assessments in a differentiated manner. According to Wormeli, teachers ought to assess students using three models. A teacher ought to pre-assess (see what students know ahead of time) and offer both formative (along the way assessments that are done often and provide feedback) and summative assessments (administered at the end of the unit and reflect upon the “essential and enduring knowledge” (Wormeli 27)). Having now completed two weeks in the field, I have seen all three of these tests administered in my practicum mentor’s classroom. Before beginning a mini lesson on how to take standardized tests, Mrs. Mochamer (my mentor teacher) did a quick, five minute quiz of true and false questions pertaining to preparing for and taking standardized tests. This type of pre-assessment was extremely useful because she could then see where students had misconceptions concerning test taking. I observed formative assessments in the form of rough drafts. The students had to write an essay on the topic of maintaining a positive attitude. In order to kind of see where the students were at, Mrs. Mochamer collected various rough draft versions so that she could get an idea of how students went about the writing process and also so that she could offer both positive and constructive feedback. I observed a summative assessment only a few days ago when the students had to take a test on a book they had just finished reading. This test was a culmination of everything that they had learned while reading the book to see if the students had met the unit objectives. It was interesting to be able to make connections to examples of assessments I had been able to observe in the classroom while reading this chapter.

Allison Reynolds
This section talked about how to assess students when teaching. When a teacher wants to differentiate a classroom, she needs to be able to assess how students are learning and if the method she is using is working. One idea that really struck me was on page 33. It says, “Some teachers get so focused on “preparing these kids for the real world” that they dismiss what they know as developmentally appropriate for the age-group”. I know when I have been teaching so many students say “How does this apply to the real world” in order to try to throw the teacher off. I have always thought of jut simply explaining how it will. Yet in math, sometimes students won’t use the skill I teach. When do people really use histograms? This is telling me it is ok to say, “It doesn’t right now, but it is a building block to something that you will use.” I think that it is ok to have things not make sense in the real world, but we as teachers stills need to teach it. Also, it really does frustrate me how we have these great ideas on how to differentiate, how to teach to reach all students, and other methods but teachers just do what they want anyway. I know it is their classroom, but I want my classroom to be open to new ideas and methods. I read that section about actually applying the different types of assessment and I got angry at the fact that teachers wouldn’t even want to try it. Why not try it?

Something that I had never really considered when planning what is important is just labeling it out. What is essential, highly desirable, and only desirable to my unit? The book just simply defined these ideas but I already want to use them. I am not sure what exactly students need to get out my lesson I am planning and this helps me organize my ideas and my priorities.

Kellie Sanborn
As I read this chapter, it occurred to me that formative and summative assessments were terms that I had heard before, but I had never really known the meaning of. I can remember teachers using the terms in high school: “oh, don’t worry, this is just a formative assessment”, but never explaining them. Looking back on it, I don’t think that the formative assessments were implicated very well, since they were nearly always in the form of tests. The naming of the tests makes perfect sense (formative=forming information and abilities, summative=summing up what was learned), but I am glad that I now have a name to put to what I think that I have already been doing (at least somewhat) these past three weeks. This chapter reminded me of a lesson that I taught last week on essential questions. We did several activities which I hoped were creating the experiences necessary to master the concept, and then I had the students take a few minutes to write about the topic. After the few minutes was up, I asked them to share their ideas with me and the rest of the class, and I discovered that they didn’t understand a crucial part of the whole. Using that information, my mentor teacher then helped me to fill in that gap and therefore create a much better understanding of the concept. I can see now that the writing activity that I asked them to do was used as a formative assessment, and from that my mentor teacher and I were able to see what still needed more work and to adjust the rest of the lesson from there.

Megan Hoffman
This chapter’s primary focus is on how to successfully assess the differentiated classroom. It pays special attention to “formative assessments” which are small periodical assessments to guide the teachers’ instruction and show what the students are grasping and where they need help. I thought that the idea of formative assessments was a pretty neat idea, I had never thought about this when I was a student in high school, but many of my “quickie quizzes” in math were formative assessments. Every day, at the beginning of class, my math teacher would give us these short 5 question quizzes and I just realized through reading this chapter that she was using a formative assessment to gauge our learning of the concepts. I’m not sure how to apply this in history quite yet, but I’m sure it will become more apparent as I gain experience in thinking like a history teacher. One idea that I didn’t necessarily agree with is at the beginning of the chapter. The author suggested that teachers give out the final test to the students at the beginning of the unit as a way to spark their interest when teaching things on the exam. I don’t necessarily think this is the right thing to do. I think I can speak for all students when I say that we are opportunists, If we get our hands on the final test we know what content we can ignore and which things to pay attention to. I think that this can cause confusion especially in a history class when things are in an ordered sequence. If they only listen to the part of class that talks about the Gettysburg address, because that is going to be on the test, and tune out the whole battle of Gettysburg which might not make an appearance, they will know the effect but not the cause. And the notion of cause and effect is crucial in history.

Mel Christensen
Most students have a built in #|radar for “bad” or unfair assessments. Especially by high school it becomes obvious that something is out of place when the night before a test or quiz students have to cram pages of knowledge or are unsure of what to expect from an assessment. Wormeli’s chapter on effective assessment techniques and design explains why the assessments that students dread are ineffective. Assessments should reflect what students have been taught, learned, and mastered rather than what they can memorize or produce on the spot. If students are engaged in class and still do not know what they will be assessed on, it reflects a lack of focus in the curriculum and on the part of the instructor. The “big ideas” and understandings that should be the focus of the curriculum have not be stressed enough or may not have been present. Assessments should act as checkpoints in the curriculum and should help to further the students’ learning and understanding of the subject. Summative assessments should act as a guide for the instructor and represent the end goal of a unit. Odds are, most of the teachers who have ever told students, “I don’t know what will be on the exam tomorrow, I haven’t made it yet,” had not been teaching towards long term goals, but instead catered to their lessons and the progress made by the students. Along the way, and even before a unit begins, teachers should be constantly assessing what the students know and understand to ensure that their lessons are making progress towards the end goals that will be reflected in the summative assessment.

Kaite Bukauskas
This chapter continues the concept in this book that assessment is a crucial aspect of successfully teaching through differentiation. Before walking into a classroom, students have many sources in which they are constantly learning from everyday including other peers, media, family, trusted adults, the community, and more. From this array of sources students may learn information that is untrue or incomplete. Teachers must be understanding of the fact that each student has a personal life that equips them with these ‘truths’ so that they can learn what these ‘truths’ are and convince students of facts in their curriculum that may not be aligned with these perceptions of ‘truths’. Teachers can do this by performing a pre-assessment before a unit to gage where the students are in their understanding of the topic. Doing this assessment gives a teacher an idea of how to shape his or her lesson and demonstrates what area he or she needs to focus on. Another form of assessment is formative, which takes place during the learning. Lastly is summative assessment, which is a way to summarize the content in a lesson plan. Through observing classes, I witnessed health teachers using group discussions, surveys, and work sheets as pre-assessment to gain an idea of student perceptions of ‘truths’ regarding health topics. By doing so they were able to understand what ‘truths’ were myths that they needed to address in class time to ensure students are gaining a thorough understanding of the health topics.

Jason B
This chapter really got me thinking about assessing my students. There are a few different ways to assess students, and each method is very useful in education. The first method of assessment that I will discuss is pre-assessment. Pre-assessment is the idea that teachers should give students the end of the year exam at the beginning of the year. This will give feedback to the teacher so that the teacher knows what they need to teach, and how in depth they need to teach it. The next method of assessment that I will discuss is called formative assessment. Formative assessment provides a snapshot of where the student is. Since they are designed to provide a snapshot or a checkpoint of where the student is, they should not be incredibly in depth. The last type of assessment that I will discuss is called summative assessment. This is where the teacher can figure out what the student really knows. This is where the teacher should really challenge the students to strive further than they ever thought they could because this is where the students will show how much of the knowledge they have absorbed. As a teacher, I know that I will have to incorporate all three types of assessment into my classroom. I really like the idea of pre-assessing my students because I strongly feel that it is important to figure out what I need to teach, and how in depth I need to teach it. It is possible that my students have taken other courses, and that they know some of the material already. If that is the case, then I will not have to focus on that part of the course as much as other parts.

Ashton Carmichael
Throughout the chapter, the author uses the phrase “real world” situations. I found this distracting because I do not see myself teaching students in a fake world with fake situations. I feel like the information we are assessing the students on is not hypothetical information that they may or may not need in their post-secondary lives, rather it is information that they will be using throughout high school and on. In the section The Wisdom of Formative Assessment Wormeli discusses how educators spend time forming a final assessment over the material. He goes on to discuss how this is ineffective and how we should be spending time designing multiple forms of assessment throughout the teaching of the material. I like this type of teaching better because, like he said, we would be able to give positive feedback along the way and help them better understand --using all four forms of understand discussed in Understanding by Design -- the material they are learning. In Wormeli’s section Be Substantive he addresses the problem of having students with lower abilities doing assignments that are not useful. Giving students busy work that is not going to help them better understand the material is a waste of time for both the students and the educator. By having the students do this, we are not teaching them, but instead baby sitting them. Forming fluff assignments seems like a way to fill up time, but not really teach material. I do not agree with just having special education students attempt the work. I would want all of my students to understand what I am teaching instead of just having them attempt the work. I want to hold all of my students to the same standard, differentiating as needed.

Chris Whitney
Chapter three of Fair Isnt Always Equal talks about the difference between Formative and Summative assessments. It was interesting to learn how these types of assessment are different yet both help to see how far along a student is in mastering something. It was also interesting to learn that formative assessments should not be graded. In a world where everyone puts so much stress on grades and how well people score, it makes sense to have some assignments purely for the purpose of seeing where a students progress is. Reading this chapter I could not help but think about a lesson I did during Psych 225 (Child and Adolescent development ) about how to see if studies are valid. It related a lot to how “over time assessments” because both deal with being done over time and varied in the way they are given. Also I learned about the difference between substantive and fluff assignments and when both are appropriate to use in the classroom. There are cases where something doesn’t go as planned and the students will need to do fluff assignments. It is apart of life, however the teacher should always try to implement substantive assignments first.