Assessment: Improving Student Learning

What is the primary purpose of assessment? A common response, and misconception, might be that the purpose of assessment is to collect marks so that the teacher can decide on a final grade that the student will receive. This week we had the opportunity to delve into the topic of assessment in order to develop a better understanding of how we can effectively use assessment for its main purpose: to improve student learning. 

Assessment AS Learning: Engaged and Empowered Students

As the graphic below illustrates, there are three different types or purposes of assessment: for learning, as learning, and of learning. As teachers, it is important that our assessment practices reflect this and that we integrate assessment for and as learning in our classroom in a balanced way. This week, as I reflected on my assessment practices during my last placement, I realized that my approach was not very balanced as I tended to focus more heavily on assessment for learning and less on assessment as learning. 

© TES. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2hm6dpt. 

As Growing Success discusses, assessment as learning is critical for improving student learning as it helps students to "develop their capacity to be independent, autonomous learners who are able to set individual goals, monitor their own progress, determine next steps, and reflect on their thinking and learning" (Ministry of Education, p. 28). It is time to move away from the traditional practices of assessment where the teacher is the only active agent engaged in assessing student's work and to instead promote a more collaborative relationship where our students are actively engaged in the assessment process. When

Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2yW6wRW. 

our students are active participants in assessment, they are more likely to be interested in their learning, to be committed to their learning, and to be confident in their ability to learn. 

One of my main goals for my upcoming placements, therefore, is to incorporate more opportunities for my students to engage in self- and peer-assessment in order to empower them to take ownership for their learning. One key way to do this is by sharing the learning goals and co-creating the success criteria before a task so that my students and I have a common and shared understanding of the goals and criteria. If my students do not know what success looks like for a given task, how can I expect them to succeed? Rubrics and checkbrics that are based on the success criteria and rating scales are another great tool for students to use to monitor their progress and to identify their strengths, needs, and next steps for improvement. 

Descriptive Feedback: The Most Powerful Assessment Tool

Our readings for this week and our class discussion both emphasized that effective descriptive feedback is far more valuable and powerful for improving student learning than giving grades. By continuously giving our students specific, timely, and meaningful feedback, we can help our students to identify their strengths and needs and to develop a concrete plan for how to improve those steps. 

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With this knowledge of the power of descriptive feedback in mind, my webinar on report card writing focused largely on how to write effective report card comments as a means of effectively communicating with and collaborating with parents and students in order to improve student learning. In our webinar, we explored three criteria for effective report card comments that were discussed in Reporting Student Learning: Guidelines for Effective Teacher-Parent-Student Communication: 

• Precise: The comments should focus on specific knowledge, skills, and criteria that are found in the curriculum that are most relevant to the student's achievement or development. It is important for the comments to provide concrete next steps for learning and concrete suggestions as to how parents can support their child's learning at home. 
• Personalized: The comments should be tailored to the individual student, referring to their interests, learning preferences, and level of readiness, using personal examples gathered from conversations, observations, and student products.
• Meaningful: The comments should be written in parent-friendly and student-friendly language and should be written in a positive tone. 

Technology in the Classroom: Assessing Apps

The Math Mindset module for this week also emphasized the value of assessment, albeit in a different context, as one of the videos focused  on the importance of assessing or evaluating the value of math apps before integrating them in the classroom. As teachers, we have a responsibility to ensure that the technology that we are incorporating in our classroom is being used for the purpose of improving or enhancing student learning rather than just for the sake of having it present in the classroom. Some key questions to keep in mind when we are assessing whether or not to include a math app in our classroom are:

• Does it help students to develop an understanding of key mathematical ideas? 
• Does it promote a positive math mindset where students do not equate time with intelligence?
• Is it an app that students will find challenging, interesting, and engaging?
• Does it encourage students to develop a deeper or more meaningful understanding of math concepts through the use of visual representations? 
• Does it encourage students to explore, play, and interact with mathematical ideas?

Blended Learning: Embracing Technology in the Math Classroom

As a student in elementary or secondary student, what role did technology play in your educational experiences in the math classroom? If I reflect on my own experiences as an elementary and secondary students, the vast majority of my math classes consisted of pencils, papers, and textbooks. Besides the occasional use of an overhead projector to display a word problem or an image on the board, the use of technology was minimal. This week, therefore, was an exciting and eye-opening week for me as I was able to explore how to integrate technology in engaging, meaningful, and powerful ways through blended learning in order to enhance teaching and learning in the math classroom.

What Is Blended Learning? 

Blended learning combines traditional face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning. Before this class, I thought that blended learning simply involved using technology in the classroom. As the graphic below shows, however, blended learning seeks to mix digital and face-to-face learning to create a dynamic learning experience where students have the opportunity to take more responsibility for the time, pace, and place of their learning. 

© Adams 12 Five Star Schools

How Can We Implement Blended Learning in the Classroom? 

The idea of creating a dynamic learning experience that fuses face-to-face instruction and digital learning was somewhat intimidating at first. Some of the initial questions that ran through my head were: Where do I begin? How do I know whether the technology that I am integrating is creating a rich and dynamic learning experience for my students? During our in-class exploration of blended learning, I found the SAMR model to be a valuable resource in helping me to overcome my initial trepidation and to understand what blended learning looks like in a classroom. 

Imagine Easy Solutions. 2014, May 29. "The SAMR Model Explained"
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© Dr. Ruben Puentedura. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/JaoAcN.

As the video above the image on the right illustrate, tech integration happens on a continuum or a scale. I can use technology to enhance my students' learning experiences by replacing traditional tools with technology as in the case of substitution or augmentation. I can also use technology to transform students' learning experiences in rich and meaningful ways by reconstructing tasks or creating new tasks that would not previously be possible without the use of technology. While my ultimate goal is to transform students' learning experiences through modification and redefinition, I think it is important to recognize that, in reality, all four parts of the SAMR model can be present when I am integrating technology in my classroom. Some lesson plans may simply involve using technology to increase the functionality of the task such as doing an online quiz with the app Kahoot! which provides students with instant feedback for self-assessment. Other lesson plans may involve tasks that would not be possible without the use of technology such as creating a video tutorial that contains videos, audio, diagrams, and photographs. 

If I reflect on my math lesson plans from placement last year, the majority of the technology that I integrated into my lessons served the purpose of substitution or augmentation. In my future classrooms, my goal is to make a more conscious effort to find ways to integrate technology to modify and redesign tasks for the twenty-first century learners in my classroom. The Padagogy Wheel is a fantastic resource for developing ideas about how to integrate technology to create rich, meaningful, and engaging tasks for students. 

© Allan Carrington. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2gWj0yX. 

Why Integrate Technology into the Classroom?

Improving Students' Mathitudes

In Making Math Children Will Love, Dr. Lynda Colgan emphasizes the importance incorporating non-traditional and attention-grabbing resources into the math classroom in order to "spark curiosity about mathematics, improve appreciation for and interest in mathematics, and contribute to understanding and relevance of mathematics in everyday life" (p. 1). Integrating interactive digital tools into the math classroom is a great way to create positive and engaging learning opportunities where students are excited to play, explore, and learn more about math. For example, during our webinar, we talked about the importance of integrating financial literacy into our lesson plans. Digital resources such as budgeting tools, games that involve financial decision-making, and videos about setting SMART goals can help our students to develop the knowledge and skills to become informed and engaged citizens in the global economy in a way that is personal, fun, and engaging. In our unit plan, we have also made an effort to include interactive digital activities and games such as the Tangram Game and the Cube Nets activity from Illuminations to spark students' curiosity about geometry.

Enhancing Student Learning

As Dr. Catherine Bruce discusses in Technology in the Mathematics Classroom, interactive whiteboards have tremendous potential to enhance student learning when they are used as a dynamic thinking tool. Interactive whiteboards promote collaboration and conversation as they allow students and teachers to show and interact with websites, diagrams, images, videos, and records of students' work. Our Math Mindset module this week discussed the value of representing mathematical concepts with drawings and manipulatives in order to develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of mathematical concepts. Interactive whiteboards provide this visual support by making allowing students to use visuals to explore mathematical ideas and to illustrate and explain their thinking. As a teacher, I would definitely integrate the use of a SMART Board or an app like Explain Everything in my classroom as a means of encouraging students to take risks, illustrate ideas, and justify their reasoning as they collaborate with their peers.

Explain Everything™ Interactive Whiteboard from Explain Everything™ on Vimeo.

The Value of Rich Math Tasks

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If I showed you the image on the right and told you that any of the four quadrants could be a correct answer to the question of which one doesn't belong, how would you feel? Would you challenge yourself to find more than one answer or would you wish that I had told you that there was only one correct answer to find?

The "Which One Doesn't Belong?" activity from this week's class emphasized the importance of breaking the stereotype that math involves only one right answer. As the article What is a Mathematically Rich Task? emphasizes, when we integrate more open, rich, and meaningful math problems into our math classrooms, it creates a "far more interesting, engaging, and powerful" learning experience for our students.

Rich Math Tasks: What Are They?

In order to integrate rich math tasks into the classroom, it is important to understand what they are. The articles Rich Tasks and Content and 6 Characteristics of Rich Math Tasks were valuable in helping me to understand the following key components of rich math tasks so that I had a better understanding and awareness of how to create and include them in my unit plan and future classroom.

1) Accessible to a Wide Range of Learners
The struggling student, the advanced student, and every student in between should see the task as challenging yet doable and should feel that they have the opportunity to contribute to the task with confidence.

2) Situated in a Real-Life Context
The task needs to be authentic and relevant to our students' lives so that they develop an interest in and understanding of how math applies to the real world around them.

3) Allows for a Variety of Approaches and Representations
As we create rich tasks, it is important to recognize, respect, and embrace students' diverse learning styles and approaches to problem solving.

4) Promotes Collaboration and Discussion
Rich tasks encourage students to share and compare their strategies, reasoning, and responses in order gain new insights and perspectives as they develop their mathematical understanding.

5) Fosters Students' Creativity
Rich tasks promote creativity and imaginative thinking as students use a variety of strategies and approaches to work through challenging problems.

6) Includes Opportunities for Challenges and Extensions
It is also important for there to be a potential to extend the task for more advanced students so that the other students can continue to work through the problem without feeling pressured to finish quickly.

© Pat McEachren. 2017.

Rich Math Tasks: Why Include Them?

While there are many benefits to integrating rich math tasks into the classroom, I would like to focus on two key benefits that really stood out to me throughout this week's content.

Students Develop a Deeper Understanding of Math

Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2x6UJuZ. 

As the Math Mindset modules this week emphasized, if we want our students to become successful mathematicians, we need to give them opportunities to collaborate, reason, and make connections so that they can develop a deeper understanding of math. Through rich math tasks, students have the opportunity to share and compare their strategies, ideas, and answers with their peers, to explain and justify their methods and choices, and to make meaningful connections to other math concepts and the real world. Rich math tasks help to prevent students from thinking that math is a frustrating subject that deals with a series of isolated concepts and that always involves using one right method to quickly find one right answer. As a teacher, it is easy to feel pressured to rush through tasks and activities in order to get through all the curriculum content, but developing rich math tasks and giving students time to collaborate, reason, and build connections is key to building a rich and positive learning environment where students build deep mathematical understanding.


Students Feel Empowered and Engaged
Rich math tasks are also valuable in helping students to become empowered and engaged learners. Our webinar this week focused on Differentiated Instruction and the importance of ensuring that all of the diverse learners in our classroom feel valued, included, and capable of achieving success. Rich tasks respect and promote diversity as students are encouraged to use a variety of methods and approaches to solve the problem and to share their strategies and ideas with their peers, ensuring that students of all levels feel that they are valued contributors to the learning taking place in their classroom.

© RSW. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2xTgYcb.

Rich tasks can also be key in building a sense of community where students feel that the teacher knows them and cares about them. When rich tasks incorporate students' names and interests and aspects of the teacher's life, the tasks become much more personal and students feel a sense of belonging. During my placement, I created a problem that involved my brother who owned a sailboat. The students loved the fact that I shared this information and a story about my own experience sailing for the first time with them and I could even see the level of engagement increase. In my future lesson plans, I will definitely make the rich tasks personal to our classroom so that students feel valued and see math as fun and meaningful.

© Belinda Olij. 2016.