Assessment Assignment

Casey Andersen

Throughout these assessment courses my understanding of assessment and evaluation

shifted from thinking that they are the same thing, to realizing that they are two different pieces

for helping students grow as learners. I now know that assessment is that constant piece through-

out the school year where I gather evidence of learning, and then provide descriptive feedback to

enable students to understand their own learning and know what their next steps need to be.

Evaluation is the step that comes once I have analyzed each of those small pieces of evidence.

Through looking at each piece of evidence, I then use my professional judgement to see where

the student is at in relation to the learning intention and the criteria of what we were learning.

-The first thing that I would change is that I would have narrowed down what I want students to

learn. I like that I only have one big idea, which is “Matter has mass, takes up space, and can

change phase,” and I think that this big idea pinpoints exactly what I want students to learn. I

also like that my unit ties to so many of the core and curricular competencies, because I think

that it is important to always be practicing these competencies so students can figure out their

strengths and stretches. For the content area, I think that I would change from having two content

areas to only have one just so my learning intention is extremely clear to students.

-The next thing that I would change is my learning intention. In my unit plan I organized my unit

to have one learning intention per week. After going through these courses I have realized that it

is an unrealistic expectation to try to push students to move quickly through their learning. Not

all students learn at the same pace, and some students will need more than a week to understand

a concept. For this reason, I would change from having five learning intentions to having two or
three to really focus on. The three I would keep are: I can do the scientific method, I know the

properties of matter, and I know why matter changes because they are three that will most help

my students grow as learners.

-The next thing that I would change would be the wording for my learning intentions. I always

try to use students friendly language for my learning intentions, but I still always ending up writ-

ing it through a teacher lens. After taking these courses I have gotten a better idea of how to write

my learning intentions how a child would.

-The next change that I would make would be to instead of creating my own criteria, do it to-

gether as a class discussion. This means that I will also have to take away a lot of the activities

that we were going to do, but I think that if students are involved in creating the criteria that they

will be more engaged in their learning and in turn have a deeper understanding. I would keep the

beginning of class where I introduce new ideas and we write on anchor charts, but for different

activities I will ask students “what counts” to co-create criteria. For small activities that are

repetitive we will do this fairly quickly, but for bigger activities like conducting the scientific

method we will have a class the day before where we will look at samples of the scientific

method and the experiment. While looking at samples we will brainstorm “what counts,” then all

together put it into sections, and then make a T-Chart so students can visualize what that activity

should look like.

-The next thing that I would change is that I would try to create more opportunities for me to col-

lect formative evidence of student learning. I like the idea of having a KWL Chart to go back to

during class discussions as evidence of student learning, but I think that it would be more benefi-

cial if on top of that also made each student their own personal KWL journal. They could write
in it every day at the end of the lesson one thing that they know, one thing they learned, and one

thing they wonder. I have a lot of little game activities that I was planning on doing for this unit

such as a scavenger hunt, a puzzle, matter museum, and matter scoot because in my class there

are many kinaesthetic learners. I think that in order to make these effective pieces of evidence,

that I need to create a notebook with each student’s name so I can write down observations that I

make during these games.

-The last thing that I would change would be for summative assessment. I think that I would cut

out most of them to make room for more class discussions and hands on work. For summative

assessment I would prioritize writing the scientific method, the states of matter flip book, and the

matter final quiz because those are the pieces that will best enable me to make a professional

judgement of student learning.