Abstract
This chapter six covers how to adminsiter fair and effective test questions. It provided some really good examples and explained them all in detail. Some sections includd how to make tests easier and faster to grade. This chapter also emphasized varied test questions, both traditional and non-traditional. This chapter also reccommend providing two answer sheets so you can provide feedback as soon as possible. This chapter also stated that tests should be clear and cover the knowledge that is necessary. The author also stated that just because you are not trying to trick students does not mean you are always being fair to them.
Reflection
It is important to note that we as a group remember bad tests. We all gave feed back stating that we remember either being confused by double negatives, or misreading a "little twist" in a question. There are alot of things that can hurt us as students when taking tests. Tests need to be straightforward, covering the big ideas, and to the point. We as students come in to take a test with our game faces on. We are usually well prepared and ready to take the test as fast as possible. Tests are not that stressful to a teacher, but many students cannot function elsewhere until that is out of the way. Audra felt that she was always worried about the time remaining during her tests. And its true. We feel an overload of anxiety over tests. teachers need to make them as fair and fast as possible. Do not give use more questions than there are minutes in the period. We could use a little more information on tiering questions as well.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Chapter 5
Abstract:
This chapter talked about the use of tiering in the classroom. When you test your students knowledge you are inevitably going to find that some students are at different levels then others. It is important to make sure your plans for assessments are flexible enough to take care of these differences because making sure that all students are learning the main ideas and expanding their knowledge is the most important thing. We need to take our assessments and break them down into different levels in order to accommodate for the needs of everyone. To help with tiering this chapter offered suggestions such as Tic Tac Toe boards, using the RAFT format, the summarization pyramid,learning contracts, cubing, and William's Taxonomy. These provide ways to adjust to students' different levels by allowing them choices of assessments. This is one way to help get the students interested. Another helper provided in this chapter for getting a students attention is a list of verbs that can make assignments seem more interesting and attention grabbing.
Reflection
I think that overall our group decided we would really like to have more information about tiering before we make a final decision on how we feel about it. Some of us really like the idea of giving students options on how to be assessed because we feel like that would definitely help to get the students more involved and interested. We all think that tiering is important but we are also all slightly confused about how it would work. We know that students are at different levels and so they may require different assignments and none of us think it is fair to allow a student to fall behind and fail simply because we didn't give them the type of work they needed. However, when we were discussing this chapter in class, the main point we talked about was how to you balance it. Personally I would be very afraid of making students feel singled out or stupid, and through our discussions in class I found that many other people thought this could be an issue as well. We spent a long time talking about how the students who were considered more advanced would realize that their work was harder than others and that they would be all to willing to point out this information. Once this happened the less advanced students would start wondering why they were getting easier work and may come to the conclusion that the teacher thinks they are stupid. If a student thinks the teacher thinks they are stupid then they will be much more inclined to think that themselves. So, when using tiering how do you make sure that this doesn't happen? We all agreed that this could be an issue and the chapter never got into any explanation of how to avoid this issue. For this reason, while we all see the definite advantages and importance of tiering, we are skeptical about using it ourselves. Another point was brought up in class discussions, and that was about what classes can use tiering. Some people think that subjects such as history would be hard to tier because they are completely based on facts and if you don't know the facts then you just don't know them. I mean if you don't know what year Columbus sailed to America how can you use tiering to solve the problem? However, I think that while the factual part may be hard to tier, there would probably be other assignments where it would be possible. For example, if you were having them write an essay on a historical event then you could use a method such as the Tic Tac Toe method in order to provide multiple options for the essay. Then again, if you were to do that, we started to wonder: Well, what is to stop the advanced students from picking the easy way out? If you tell them they can't pick certain topics then we get back into the questions about singling students out. Overall I would have to say, and after reading this you would probably agree, that this chapter brought forth a lot of question within the class. Personally, I think this was excellent because it really got us thinking and asking important questions. Hopefully those questions will be answered throughout this course.
*Posted by Chelsae
This chapter talked about the use of tiering in the classroom. When you test your students knowledge you are inevitably going to find that some students are at different levels then others. It is important to make sure your plans for assessments are flexible enough to take care of these differences because making sure that all students are learning the main ideas and expanding their knowledge is the most important thing. We need to take our assessments and break them down into different levels in order to accommodate for the needs of everyone. To help with tiering this chapter offered suggestions such as Tic Tac Toe boards, using the RAFT format, the summarization pyramid,learning contracts, cubing, and William's Taxonomy. These provide ways to adjust to students' different levels by allowing them choices of assessments. This is one way to help get the students interested. Another helper provided in this chapter for getting a students attention is a list of verbs that can make assignments seem more interesting and attention grabbing.
Reflection
I think that overall our group decided we would really like to have more information about tiering before we make a final decision on how we feel about it. Some of us really like the idea of giving students options on how to be assessed because we feel like that would definitely help to get the students more involved and interested. We all think that tiering is important but we are also all slightly confused about how it would work. We know that students are at different levels and so they may require different assignments and none of us think it is fair to allow a student to fall behind and fail simply because we didn't give them the type of work they needed. However, when we were discussing this chapter in class, the main point we talked about was how to you balance it. Personally I would be very afraid of making students feel singled out or stupid, and through our discussions in class I found that many other people thought this could be an issue as well. We spent a long time talking about how the students who were considered more advanced would realize that their work was harder than others and that they would be all to willing to point out this information. Once this happened the less advanced students would start wondering why they were getting easier work and may come to the conclusion that the teacher thinks they are stupid. If a student thinks the teacher thinks they are stupid then they will be much more inclined to think that themselves. So, when using tiering how do you make sure that this doesn't happen? We all agreed that this could be an issue and the chapter never got into any explanation of how to avoid this issue. For this reason, while we all see the definite advantages and importance of tiering, we are skeptical about using it ourselves. Another point was brought up in class discussions, and that was about what classes can use tiering. Some people think that subjects such as history would be hard to tier because they are completely based on facts and if you don't know the facts then you just don't know them. I mean if you don't know what year Columbus sailed to America how can you use tiering to solve the problem? However, I think that while the factual part may be hard to tier, there would probably be other assignments where it would be possible. For example, if you were having them write an essay on a historical event then you could use a method such as the Tic Tac Toe method in order to provide multiple options for the essay. Then again, if you were to do that, we started to wonder: Well, what is to stop the advanced students from picking the easy way out? If you tell them they can't pick certain topics then we get back into the questions about singling students out. Overall I would have to say, and after reading this you would probably agree, that this chapter brought forth a lot of question within the class. Personally, I think this was excellent because it really got us thinking and asking important questions. Hopefully those questions will be answered throughout this course.
*Posted by Chelsae
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Chapter 4
Abstract:
This chapter discussed three different forms of assessment: portfolios, rubrics and student self-assessment. As the chapter mentioned, portfolios are good to use because they are composed of many items and are taken over a long amount of time. The next type of assessment was the rubric. Chapter 4 mentioned two types of this assessment, analytic and holistic. Rubrics account for such things as content, clarity and practicality. When using rubrics, it is important to not put too much emphasis on the less important ideas. The final type of assessment was student self-assessment. This could be done through checklists or reflections on what the student has learned or has yet to learn.
Reflection:
We all agreed that this chapter would be useful to us in the classroom. Chelsae and Erik both really liked the section on portfolios. Erik thought that he would use them in his classroom and liked the idea of letting the students put all of the pieces into it while Chelsae thought that this information would be helpful when putting together her own portfolio. Audra really liked the section on rubrics and remembered that one of her high school teachers had used rubrics and it had really motivated her to produce better work. However, the section on rubrics was a little unclear as Chelsae had a hard time figuring out the difference between holistic and analytic rubrics. Chelsae and Audra both liked the idea of student self assessment because they are versatile and help the students and teachers learn more about one another. Audra will be interested to see if they work in the classroom as well as the chapter suggests.
Monday, February 5, 2007
chapter 1
Abstract
Chapter one gave us more information on the differentiated instructing, in this chapter the book explains that it is doing what is fair for students, it goes into a lot of information about differentiated instruction and asks if there could be any downsides to it being used in the modern classroom. It also explains to teachers what we must be able to do in our classrooms with our students to be successful in using the differentiated theory of teaching. Some of these things we must do is recognize who our learners are, what could hinder them from leaning, what their abilities are, and also being able to be flexible to accommodate for our students.
Reflection
We all felt that we could understand this chapter really well because of the overlapping of the material to our other books. Being able to read this chapter and really bring together both the Mi theory information and the other information from DI, and be able to apply both to the classroom at the same time really helped consolidate the information. We all also thought that the most important part of this chapter is when it tells teachers to take responsibility for the information and their student’s performances in the classroom. We all thought that this has been lost on many teachers, and that the differentiated theory of learning could help bring that back and revitalize the classroom setting for many teachers.
Posted by matt colby
chapter 3
Abstract
In this chapter the book discuses how we as teachers can have good assessments in our classrooms. This chapter talks about pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment. All have one thing is common, we as teachers should have our end goal in mind when formulating or doing anyone of these strategies. This chapter also deals with student readiness in learning the material, how to design students assessments, and how to carry out assessments of students. This chapter also suggests that teachers give students the opportunity to redo assignments, and know the answers and questions on the test in advance of the test.
Reflection
We all thought that this book made sense when it came to student having the opportunity to redo work because none of us always are 100 percent all the time. We all also agree that the avoidance of Fluff assignments is key in our classrooms we as students hated the fluff when we were in high school, why would we want to give it to our kids. We also agree that students should be able to know specifically what is going to be covered on the test. Because it is not fair to just tell students to study three months worth of information in one week, for one test. And we all agree that students should be able to show their knowledge on multiple forms of assessment, not just one test al the end of the quarter or semester.
Posted by matt colby
Chapter 2
Abstract:
This chapter addresses the subject of mastery. It talks about the need for a clear definition of what mastery is. You need to decide what the most important things for the students to know are and then you need to come up with ways of assessing them. Assessments must determine who only has a simple understanding and who actually has mastered the material. The six facets were discussed as a way to help teachers assess mastery. It is important that assessments are actually assessing the important ideas and not focusing on unimportant concepts. In this chapter you will find examples of how to determine which information is the most important and will help the students meet the required standards.
Reflection:
I think for the most part our team had never put to much thought into how much work needs to go into making assessments. I think we all knew that there were standards that needed to be met and that standardized tests are definitely not the best way to determine if they had been met, but we hadn't really considered what would be the best way to determine mastery. It was pointed out that some teachers only focus on material that interests them and they don't pay much attention to the standards and other information that is important for students to learn. Some members of our group found the examples from the book very useful and think that they will help them to determine mastery in the future. Personally, I thought this chapter helped to explain the purpose of the packet we had to do. It really emphasized the importance of figuring out the big ideas and making sure the students master them. Having a variety of testing methods is a very important part of being a teacher because one test does not give you all the information you need about a students knowledge, and one testing style is not fair to all students. If you don't use variety then it is easy to think that a student has not mastered the subject even if they have.
*posted by Chelsae
This chapter addresses the subject of mastery. It talks about the need for a clear definition of what mastery is. You need to decide what the most important things for the students to know are and then you need to come up with ways of assessing them. Assessments must determine who only has a simple understanding and who actually has mastered the material. The six facets were discussed as a way to help teachers assess mastery. It is important that assessments are actually assessing the important ideas and not focusing on unimportant concepts. In this chapter you will find examples of how to determine which information is the most important and will help the students meet the required standards.
Reflection:
I think for the most part our team had never put to much thought into how much work needs to go into making assessments. I think we all knew that there were standards that needed to be met and that standardized tests are definitely not the best way to determine if they had been met, but we hadn't really considered what would be the best way to determine mastery. It was pointed out that some teachers only focus on material that interests them and they don't pay much attention to the standards and other information that is important for students to learn. Some members of our group found the examples from the book very useful and think that they will help them to determine mastery in the future. Personally, I thought this chapter helped to explain the purpose of the packet we had to do. It really emphasized the importance of figuring out the big ideas and making sure the students master them. Having a variety of testing methods is a very important part of being a teacher because one test does not give you all the information you need about a students knowledge, and one testing style is not fair to all students. If you don't use variety then it is easy to think that a student has not mastered the subject even if they have.
*posted by Chelsae
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