CORTNIE BELSER'S MSED PORTFOLIO
Engaging Students in Assessments
In the classroom, each learner must be given the opportunity to make sense of their own progress and consider how their self-reflection and action planning can guide interventions and push student achievement.
Introduction
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As an integral component to establishing teacher growth, students must also demonstrate their growth through making sense of diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. First, while engaging students in diagnostic facilitates goal-setting initiatives, they can also be counterproductive to student efficacy if diagnostic data demonstrates underperformance. Secondly, formative data is by far the most impactful assessment that engages many of my students on a daily basis. Lastly, summative data reflect how class goals and vision can be actualized when students are invested in witnessing their progress towards the end of a unit.
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As the teacher, I am constantly strategizing and facilitating opportunities for students to understand their progress in the class and utilize their own student work as the anchor to reflect effective or ineffective learning progress. To support family involvement in my classroom, investing students in their own assessment data allows students to take autonomy of the learning space when asked to demonstrate learning. Whether or not students are meeting standards mastery, there are clear expectations of how students can measure their success in the course and reflect on action steps necessary to move towards student achievement. As one facilitator of learning in the classroom, my role is to utilize my feedback and class structures to forward student self-assessment and self-management of their learning.
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Accountability Systems
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To invest students in assessment achievement, I ensure consistency in organizational structures established in the classroom. Each student has received a class folder that stays in their class bins to hold work throughout a unit. Each class bin is labeled and each folder is organized to ensure student and teacher are aware of the work needed to be assessed, feedback given, and content mastery. Each student folder holds their weekly warm-up sheet, class notes, exit tickets with grading or feedback, and other academic materials that may be needed during learning and assessment.
The image above illustrates how I utilize class folders to engage students in tracking their work progress. When students enter the classroom, they immediately retreive their folder and begin working.
The document above is a sample of the PowerPoint I present to students the first week of school to provide time to build engagement and expectation of the work folders. The set-up of the mailbox in my folders is an opportunity for informal student-teacher communication.
Since about 12 percent of my students are designated as chronically absent or truant, I have filed daily notes, handouts, and assessments into folders so that students can take ownership of their missed assignments. Prior to communicating to me or peers, an absent student knows the expectation is to retrieve any missed assignments from the black bin of weekly handouts as well as their weekly Ready Now (warm-up) and homework sheets, if necessary. As a strategy to engage all learners, the physical space of having a missed work section in the classroom allows me to visually acknowledge students who have been absent and anticipate what learning I will need to fill during the day's instruction.
Assessment Trackers
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As a school wide investment measure, students track their i-Ready data using quantitative and qualitative expression. To invest students in their own performance I include structures in instruction that acknowledge the progress of individuals and whole class.
The image above represents how I track standards-based formatives assessments in homework, classwork, and other assignments. Each chart represents a different class and are tracked based on reading and writing standard-aligned questions.
As shown in the image, students receive a slash across a box when they reached more than 50 percent standard mastery but less than 85 percent. To engage students in this assessment tracker, I allows each student to provide a nickname for the data wall.
The image above is a sample of a PowerPoint I provide to engage students in i-Ready reflection at the beginning of the year during student-teacher data conferences.
The document above represents student samples of the i-Ready tracker that students will use for the year. The first two pages represents a completed assessment tracker. The additional student trackers and reflections demonstrate student engagement and self-efficacy to achieve on the i-Ready throughout the year. This engagement strategy informs how I can build student achievement through the qualitative data reflections on how student self-assess their own achievement and areas of growth.
Assessment Incentives
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Every other Friday, I utilize an interactive formative assessment format to engage and reinvest in student growth. On the alternative Formative Friday, students engage in a more traditional assessment style, such as a quiz or test. To reinforce extrinsic motivations, students are able to receive extra credit for challenging assessment tasks.
The PowerPoint above are three sample activities in which I provide incentives during an assessment. The red box on the first slide indicates three tiers of assessment incentives I often provide students. To widen the number of incentives provided in one assessment, the tiers of incentives allow more students to take advantage of the incentive and have a higher engagement. Additionally, the green box in the top right of slides 2 and 3 are an example of how I encourage students to engage during assessment that does not require additional resources. Since I consistently provide homework, students are engaged in the assessment as it offers a tangible reward for academic achievement.
The red box in the PowerPoint to the left highlights how I integrate bonus questions to students to gauge their active engagement during assessments. When students are aware of potential bonus points, they are more inclined to become more active readers to identify mistakes and earn credit for this accomplishment. During the assessment, I encourage students to focus on answering their assessment questions while also deepening their awareness of test questions by earning the bonus.
While 2-3 students from each class were able to identify the mistake in this question, the student sample to the right demonstrates gaps in engaging students in assessments. While the student correctly identified that the text evidence was a statement from the mayor rather than the dentist, I marked his paper in the moment so he could finish the assessment. However, during formal grading, the student did not demonstrate grade-level standard mastery. Thus, while the student was invested and engaged in this assessment incentive, they continue to struggle to articulate comprehension of rigorous texts.