Assessing Understanding

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Assessing Understanding

• Math Summer Institute 2007
• Lisa Lunney

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Understanding Assessment

• Assessment of learning (Summative)
• Assessment for learning (Formative)
• The assessment cycle

Planning Assessment Setting clear goals
Gathering Evidence Employing multiple methods
Using Results Making decisions
Interpreting Evidence Making inferences
Van de Walle (2005) p.66
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Four purposes of Assessment
Promote Growth
Purposes of Assessment
Monitoring student progress
Making instructional decisions
Evaluating programs
Improve Instruction
Modify Program
Evaluating student achievement
Recognize Accomplishment
Van de Walle (2005) p.68
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Two Key Questions!

• How can we create rich tasks or questions that
  enable us to determine if students truly
  understand?
• What classroom management strategies can we
  employ to enable the teacher to observe and
  assess?

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Task Selection

• Good problems
• Begin where they are
• Focus on important mathematics
• Requires justification and explanation
• Promotes doing mathematics and encourages
  understanding
• May be open-ended
• Open Process many ways to arrive at the answer
• Open End Product many possible solutions
• Open Question can explore new problems related
  to the old problem
• Promotes the Big Five!

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Think Multiple Representations
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Classroom Strategies

• Group Work
• Investigations
• Learning Centers