More math assessment: The audit
A few days ago, I posted about Dan Myer, a young math teacher in California who has been using a unique way to test his students. He’s provided a follow-up to that post to show us how that method has worked in real life.
He first presented them with their grades from each assignment, and asked them if those scores coincided with that of their own. You see, he’s had them take the extra step of keeping track of their own scores also. In a few cases, there was a discrepancy that was quickly fixed. He claims that this produced some buy-in from the students. In a subsequent comment in this post, he explained:
There are a lot of necessary barriers between teacher and student but this is one I’m happy to do away with. I don’t bring their grades down from a mountain top engraved in stone. These are our grades.
Next, he had them guess how they were doing as a class on each assignment. To their credit, they were able to correctly identify the top seven categories. He announced that they would be spending some time as a class working on the remaining six categories that needed more work.
He then put their assignments on the board. You see, each student has a different assignment based on their individual needs. Kids buy into it because they are able to use these assignments to practice for the next mini-test. They can raise their grade, regardless of how they did on the previous test.
Granted, this method requires a bit more work on the part of the instructor. Mr. Myer acknowledged that the Audit time was a “terrible day for free-time, but a proud day for assessment.”
Here in Oregon, it would interesting to track these students and see how their learning in the classroom matched up with state assessment scores. My guess is that there would be a high correlation in these areas.
Technorati Tags: math, assessment, teaching, education, learning
