Excuses aside, I have recently submitted a proposal for the Canadian Mathematics Education Forum held during May 1 - 4 of this year. I figured since I haven't had time to clean out a giant backlog of drafts in my blogger, I might as well share something :)
Our summative task for grade 9 last year in June (yes I know... remember I mentioned the backlog of drafts?) was designed, in part, out of the desire to evaluate student thinking in a different way. We
allowed the task to take place over two days.
Day 1:
Throughout the school year, students were exposed to these
types of prompts, so it’s not strange to them.
The difference here, is that they are attempting to demonstrate their understanding of the overall
expectations in the grade 9 curriculum.
Students are then
provided with toothpicks to help them design and think. In their group discussions, students develop
their own questions and planned their approaches together. In addition to manipulatives and their
groups, they also have a sheet of instructions, suggestions, as well as a list
of the grade 9 overall expectations. In
the picture below, for example, you can see a group of students sharing
their ideas and recording their plans on paper.
During this time, we circulated the room and participated in
their discussions.
We did not offer
corrections. We did not steer their
thinking. Instead, we asked questions
about what they were thinking and how they were thinking about their ideas. I took lots of pictures and videos in order to consider them as evidence of student thinking (I lost most of these files when my iPad got wiped... argh)
At the end of Day 1, everything is collected from the
students.
If you think about it though, it's not much different from any other day in the classroom. The difference lies in the following:
1. act 2 is student created without prompts
2. there is no act 3 (that we are directing). Students may come up with their own explosive endings and conclusions, but it was not scripted.
3. students have a goal. That goal is to demonstrate their learning of the curriculum. They did not have as much need to create"products" during class activities.
And then we moved on to day 2…
Day 2:
Students now sit individually, as they are handed back
everything from day 1. One thing is
different this time around: they have to incorporate marshmallows.
Some students
followed their plan from the previous day and just added the marshmallows in
between.
Others saw opportunities to extend to
three-dimensions.
Regardless, they
understand that the second day is around their individual abilities to create and solve problems based on their understanding of the grade 9 curriculum.
Student achievement
is not considered as 1 numerical grade.
Instead, we considered what students were able to demonstrate, and added
it to their existing evidence record under whichever overall expectations they
have decided to show.
I did not teach the same course this semester, and I did something different with my summative task this time around, but that's for another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment