April Journal Summary #1

Teaching Children Mathematics. Asmorgasbord of assessment options. By: Kathy Bacon

This article is focused on student-centered classroom assessment. Assessment should support the learning of useful mathematics and provide useful information to both teachers and students. Teachers should look at assessments to see where next to go with their students and should really use assessment as a guide for the next phases of learning. For assessment to really be effective teachers need to use a variety of techniques, understand their goals, and think about what is really being developed. Math should be a progression of learning. Van de Well provided an idea of the different levels of learning and how children should move through the process. Level 0: Visualization, Level 1: Analysis, Level 2: Informal Deduction, Level 3: Deduction, Level 4: Rigor. These levels help to assess a student's level of geometric thinking. An example was then given of three students at different levels of their geometric thinking. Through each child's reasoning the teacher was able to help the student build and go further into their geometric thinking. This article really stresses how assessments should allow creation of products that show their thought process. The assessment option should be thoughtfully matched to the achievement target.

I thought this article gave a lot of insight into assessment. I had never really thought of assessment as a progression. I can see now why it is so important to have insightful assessment for math. One thing about the article I didn't really like was all the examples given. I did not see how they were related or how they showed progression. I wish they would have given more examples of what the students were taught, what the assessment was, and then where the teacher went from there. I would have also liked to see how the teacher analyzed the assessment results a little bit more. Overall, I though the article was helpful in making teachers think more about assessment but I do not think it was presented in the best manner.