Assessment

The Assessment INTASC standard calls for the teacher to understand and use multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher’s and learner’s decision making. Assessments, when used correctly, are an invaluable tool for teachers of all content areas. In this particular section, I have highlighted a full unit I taught in Intro to Economics to 11^th and 12^th graders included the summative assessment and the five formative assessments as well as their data and my color-coding system for identifying students who are struggling more in certain areas and to identify sections of the unit that need to be revisited.

Article 1 is the full Unit Plan, including all of the materials used during the unit as well as the lesson plans and where each assessment fits in to my teaching plans and overall comprehension goals. I believe that assessments do not always have to be “boring” and that varied and creative assessments allow all learning styles to exhibit their knowledge and offers great practice. Article 2 is the first formative assessment of this unit which asks students to analyze historic labor union documents and then to work as a group to create a fictional labor contract covering the five main labor contract points. Article 3 covers the rest of the formative assessments which were all online in the for of Kahoots and Google Forms. Kahoots served as informal and anonymous assessments which the students really enjoy and which reveal areas of weakness. The Google Form quizzes were created to offer more specific misconception feedback and to have the students practice mathematic concepts that require individual repetition. Google forms give class trends, individual question data, and general data all in a helpful excel sheet format. All of the formative assessments of this unit were for student growth and monitoring each students’ strengths and weaknesses with each learning objective as the unit progressed so as to guide my teaching and to help students account for their own progress. Article 4 is the summative assessment as given to the students on the last day of the unit. This assessment was designed to cover every area of the unit and was given as a written exam to account for individual learner needs within 504s and IEPs. Article 5 is the key for the summative assessment and outlines the goals I had for student achievement on the assessment. Article 6 is my data chart for all of the unit assessments, color coded by grade to reveal trends. For example, after Quiz 1 it became apparent that the class needed to review quite a few of the new labor market trends. The next class, I dedicated half of the class time toward review of the concepts the class was struggling with. Following the summative assessment, a few of the students showed a need for further review. In Period 3, Student C and Student H had particular difficulty. In Period 4, Student E, Student I, and Student O showed need for further review as well. All students received individual written feedback on their exams and students who showed larger misconceptions were set up for individual review sessions.