Assessments and Preparation Expectations

What a week at Grandville Middle! Throughout the week, I was able to learn quite a lot about what it looks like to live the teacher life. From reviewing content in preparation for assessments and beginning to teach new units to seeing students be heavily impacted and influenced by grades and observing a student and his teachers in a few other classes, it sure was one wild ride this week!

Although it seems as though I could write a lengthy essay on what happened this week, I am going to focus on assessments and their preparation from both the student and teacher sides. In both Math 8 and Algebra 1, assessments were given over units of review material, Math 8 had a quiz over their Integers Unit, and Algebra 1 had both a quiz and test over their Algebra Basics unit. Since these units were review and in-class work and review days seemed to be going well, I was expecting that students were going to perform well on the assessments going into both quiz days. Upon grading the quizzes in both classes, I was met with mixed results. Check out these gifs below for what I found.

Two thumbs up for Math 8

Oh, yikes for Algebra...

Let's start with discussing Math 8. These classes had multiple days in class to review the content as they played Integers Jeopardy and had a quiz review worksheet. The students seemed to be doing well over the course of those days, and their quiz scores showed that. Most students scored over 80%, leaving me mostly satisfied. I wonder how much of the errors that were made were due to a lack of understanding and how much of it was feeling overconfident in the material, since the entire unit was presented as a review unit. In the days after the quiz, its content has been needed in the new Expressions and Equations unit, and it does seem as though students crammed and dumped the concepts. On a side note, the equations side of this unit is a 10-day "mini-unit" that I am so beyond excited to be developing with my partner teacher assistant!

That's me!

  Ok, now don't get too exited, Nick. We still have to talk about those Algebra assessments.

Oh, yea...

You've probably guessed it by now; they didn't go as well as we would have hoped. Well, my cooperating teacher knew that the scores would likely be the lowest average grade for the year (since they would feel overconfident in their abilities), but none of us expected them to be as low as they turned out. I mean, this is just about the reaction the students gave us once the quizzes were returned.

What?!?!?! There's no way!

Given that this class is an advanced course in combination that it was a publicized review unit, the students seemed to be expecting an excellent quiz score. However, the high score was an 85%, with most of the scores in the 60-70%. This lead to one student asking, "Well, if we all did bad on this quiz, is it really our fault?" This really is a valid question. As teachers, we must look at quiz scores like this and wonder how much of it can be explained by our teaching. But what else is important to consider is what efforts students are contributing as well. Before this quiz, the students were given a quiz review worksheet the day before the quiz and were provided an answer key with all of the problems worked out. Thus, the expectation, which was verbalized to students, was that they would complete the worksheet and check their answers to make sure they knew what was going on. What they did not know was that the quiz was essentially the same thing as the quiz review, but with different numbers. Joey, below, shows the reaction of the students when they learned of this fact.

This revelation was made the day between the unit quiz and the unit test. Also, they were given a test review that day to complete in preparation for the test the next day. This time, too, they were given a worked out answer key. I had the opportunity to score both the quiz review and the test review, and it was definitely interesting to see how students responded to these quiz scores. For the quiz review, only two students out of the combined 64 had a perfect score. For the test review, that increased to about 12 of them, with another 20 only a couple questions behind. What this told me was that students still were not looking at the provided answer key, even after being explicitly told to do so.

To explain this occurrence, I can offer my best guess. Students worked more carefully in completing the rest review but still did not check their answers, since it was made known to them that the score in the gradebook would be based on completion. After all, the test scores were beyond better; as a matter of fact, they looked a lot like the Math 8 distribution as there were a good chunk in the upper 90% range and one student even received a score above 100% after one question was thrown out.

So what really happened? I'm not sure. I can only really know if I polled the class and they gave honest responses. However, what I do know is that this tells me that there is a disconnect between what my cooperating teacher, my partner teacher assistant, and myself were expecting of students. In other words, it is apparent that the students are not preparing in ways that are beneficial to them, even when they are explicitly given a method to help them out. To me, this tells me in another capacity that teaching is more than delivering content. We must also be helping out students as much as possible with test preparation strategies, among many other things. After all, we cannot assume that students enter our classroom with every tool and strategy that will allow them to be successful in our class. Thus, I will take this lesson and keep in mind throughout the rest of this year in both of my placements as well as in my future classroom.

With another assessment coming in just over a week, I will look to be more intentional helping students learn what they can do to assist them in brushing up and learning the material in order to be successful. Here's to another week full of lessons to be learned about teaching!