Angela Anderson

Term 3 Artifact 1
3/17/16
Domain 1f: Assesses Student Learning

As I spoke with mentors and read further about assessment, I discovered that one of
my challenges relates to my content area and is not uncommon among Language
Arts teachers. I have always felt driven by the fact that most assessment in my
content occurs through writing assignments. This can be time-consuming, both in
the process of students creating their writing piece and in the process of me grading
the work. I wanted to start my exploration of assessment by identifying some new
ways that I could assess student learning more quickly and more consistently in my
classes. Because their summative assessment is usually a writing assignment, I
decided to focus on ways to track where my students thinking was as they worked
through research, reading or interpreting information. I specifically wanted to
develop some strategies for having students complete class Exits.
Attached are two of the new Exit assessments that I triedPadlet and Tweets. For
both, I asked students to respond to a question or to share one piece of information
that they had learned. Students particularly enjoyed being able to see others
responses on the Padlet and they enjoyed creating hashtags for the Tweets. The
Tweets also challenged them to be concise in summarizing their learning. Their
creative hashtags actually provided me with a lot of insight into whether they were
getting the material or not.
I also utilized the socrative.com Quick Question as a warm up to assess knowledge
at the beginning of the class, then showed the responses at the end of class to
reflect on what had changed. Because we are working on an argument, another
strategy I tried was to have students post sticky notes to show their initial opinion
of a claim. During the unit, they could move their note any time that their thinking
changed based on the research they were conducting. I used a different color note
for each class and then, took a picture on the first day so that each class could
reflect on changes made by the end of the unit.
All of these assessment tools and strategies enabled students to be more reflective
upon their own learning, and all of them provided me with useful formative
assessment information/feedback with which to prepare for further instruction.
Because these assessments could be evaluated quickly, I was able to see which
students understood the material and met my instructional goals and which
students needed further support or redirection in the very next lesson.

My next step is to explore ways to involve students in their own self-assessment and
in designing their own assessments and rubrics.