Hannah Deremo

EPS-513
February 14, 2014

Final Paper: Formative Assessments


The student learning question that I focused these formative assessments around was how
are my students improving on meeting the mathematical standard of measuring lengths indirectly
and by iterating length units (1.MD.A.1) The formative assessments that I used to study this
focus were my exit slips that the students completed at the end of each measuring lesson. During
our math portion of the day, the students are used to completing an exit ticket, a worksheet or
video of some kind, that demonstrates their learning. Although this the norm we dont use the
words such as exit ticket when distributing this to our children since they are in kindergarten.
We integrate it as part of our lesson activity and the ones that I used for this purpose were
activity sheets directly taken from our math curriculum (Georgia Math). I think that the
strengths of this assessment are that the worksheets were all written using the same language
since they all came from the same source. They were also only a few questions long and were in
the same format. This allowed for transparency and we didnt need to have so much explaining
of what was expected of the students. I think that a weakness is that this type of assessment can
become very familiar and the students got sick of seeing the same type of worksheet to complete
around measuring. The only thing that changed was what they used to measure. Other
assessments that my students must take are also familiar, such as their dictated sentences that
they do every week. The difference with the formative assessment compared to the math unit
test is the length and the formative assessment directly relates to what we learned that day. I
think that these formative assessments have consequential validity and really help us see the
growth and are beneficial to instruction.
In order to see the growth and my student progression I created four graphs. The first
graph that I created shows the student scores for the first formative assessment, then I created a
graph that showed the first two scores of the assessments, and the last graph I created showed all
three scores side by side to each other.

Graph 1




Graph 2


These representations help me see how my students did on each test. Its nice to see them
directly aligned to each other and makes it easier to synthesize the graphs. It helps me see if
theyve improved on the skill that I am teaching which happens to be measuring objects with
different types of measuring tools. Its nice to have the data organized and easy to read.
Overall the class did very well throughout the different formative assessments. As you
can see from the graph majority of the students did well on all three assessments. Out of the 3
assessments it looks as if some students had problems with the 3rd assessment. If you take a
look at ERs data you can see that she got 100% on the first two assessments and then got a 66%
on the third one. If you examine other students such as JN, LS, LG, CL this happened to them as
well. I think this is because of the amount of questions on the assessment and that this was given
first thing in the morning, whereas the others occurred right after math in the afternoon. I think
this is important information to take into consideration because it could be the reason for these
scores. When looking at KS you can tell that his skills definitely improved. He went from just
below a 60% to a 100%. I think that I would need to look into these formative assessments even
further in order to see what mistakes they made.
Through this representation of my students learning I have learned that the progression of
my students was very rapid. Measuring skills was something that my students picked up on
fairly quickly and this is evident from my students scores on the exit slips. After the first exit
slip that my students completed I gave feedback to the students on how they did. I had just
learned about how to give feedback to my students that would be beneficial to their growth from
the module that we read for class about instant feedback. The way that I provided feedback was
by creating a re-teaching video on the ipad that they watched the next day. The video showed
them what they got wrong and how they could fix these errors. Then I was able to see who used
this knowledge to improve on their next exit slip. This feedback was pretty instant and
individualized. Having this knowledge from the modules and readings really helped me form
this picture of the feedback loop and showed me that my students learn from this type of
teaching. This was also something that my group was telling me during the data workshop, they
encouraged me to use this feedback to push my students learning. This whole formative
assessment process overall showed me how vital it is to analyze what is going on in your
classroom through the data. The data provides a clear cut view of who is understanding the
information and who might need more work, as well as what you need to improve on as a
teacher. It showed me the vital role exit slips and these types of informal assessments play in the
classroom.
As far as next steps, I want to continue to track their performance. We have a few more
days of this type of instruction on measurement. I want to continue analyzing the data to see
what their misconceptions are when it comes to measuring. Im also very eager to see how their
final summative assessment on measurement goes after basing my instruction off of these
formative assessment results. I wat to see if there will be a different. In order to reine the
formative assessments of my students learning I think that I could make the assessments more
uniform in regards to number of questions. This will be able to give me a better ideas on
whether or not it was a lucky guess or if they really know the skills. Im ready to continue doing
this type of data gathering on my students.