Exit tickets were used often during my first year. They offered a quick way of understanding whether students grasped that day's material
A midterm exam is a great mid-point check to see if students have retained the accrued information
End of unit/final tests remain a staple of my means of formally assessing students.
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I’m contented to report that my brief span at Clarksdale High has already informed me of many valuable lessons, and one of the foremost lessons which I learned practically from the onset of my teaching career was the necessity of assessing my students’ mastery of course material. In order to sort this goal, I’ve made use of a sundry of different techniques in the hopes of both formally and informally my students’ mastery of geometry and French.
With regards to the informal methods used to evaluate my student’s comprehension of my pedagogical disseminations, I have extensively put into practice the popcorn method. I need to know right away if my students really know the material, and if not, what immediate course of action I can take to gear them towards learning. This technique involves asking a rudimentary question at the onset and allowing each student whom I call on to proffer an answer. However, one informal assessment isn’t enough in my opinion. I still use another informal assessment to know if my students fully understand the material. Therefore, I make sure to give my students an exit ticket at the end of the lesson. I test them on two questions which cover the essence of the day’s geometry and French content to have a more in-depth understanding of whether the students have truly mastered, and retained, the heart of the day’s lesson. However, I also employ formal assessments to truly discern whether my students understand the material or not. I usually make a date about halfway through the unit I’m teaching to schedule a mid-unit exam in order to see how my students have grasped the unit material up to that point. I also make sure to schedule a final unit exam for the last day of the unit in order to assess the extent to which they’ve understood all of the covered material up to that point. I feel that tests are important because high school is the right time to prepare students for the test-heavy schedules my students will soon face in college. However, I don’t limit my formal assessments to just the midterm and final unit test. Because they essentially sacrifice an entire day of instruction, I also assign multi-day projects in between testing dates in order to find out if my students are able to apply what they’ve learned in the real world by requiring them to model their knowledge in a non-abstract, concrete setting (the opposite case being usually what is assessed when a test is administered). By so doing, I’m able to have much more depth of understanding of my students’ understanding than if I was to only assign a two-question exit ticket sporadically every couple of days on only one or two topics at a time. Exit tickets and other informal assessments are advantageous by nature of their ease of distribution and speed at which data can be collected, but they lack a depth that tests provide and a concrete grounding of course material which projects offer. I also want my students to be capable in a wide range of evaluation settings, both informal and formal. My time spent at Clarksdale has taught me that the best approach is to couple both informal and formal techniques in order to use the advantages of each for the betterment of the children with whose pedagogical upbringing I have been charged. Now, although the way I’ve both informally and formally assessed my students has remained fairly constant in some regards, there have also been some drastic changes from last year. One of the cornerstones of informally assessing my students that I’ve retained from last year has been the cold calling method of asking random students around the classroom to provide an answer. I’ve found that this method is excellent at providing a quick overview of what my students either understand or don’t understand as it relates to the objective I’m currently working on. Whereas formal assessments such as tests, quizzes, and homework assignments provide a more thorough breakdown of a particular student’s mastery of an objective – making them especially useful for analyzing the best means by which to fix problems related to student objective mastery – they take much longer to assign, grade, analyze, and return, compared to informal methods such as cold calling, which provide immediate student-teacher feedback. For this reason, both this year and last, I’ve ensured I always allot some time during guided practice for various cold calling techniques, which include the popcorn method of quickly asking a string of related questions to students around the classroom in the hopes that student responses build off of the answers just provided. And while I’ve retained giving out homework, quizzes, and tests as a means of formally assessing my students, I’ve partially done away with exit tickets since last year. Exit tickets worked great for me last year in that they had the advantages of both informal and formal assessments. They could be distributed and analyzed quickly on par with other informal assessments, and they could also be used to get a more thorough understanding of a student’s comprehension of the subject material on par with other formal assessments. The question may then arise, if they combine the best of both worlds for both informal and formal assessments, why did I end up abandoning them this year? The reasons are in fact many. First of all, they have the potential to take a lot of time to grade. Now this isn’t so bad when it pertains to a test, since they are required to be given to students (unlike exit tickets) and because their infrequent nature makes the time burden bearable. However, exit tickets at least last year were a daily occurrence, which made the time devoted to grading, analyzing, and returning them substantial. Second, exit tickets only provided a brief glimpse of a student’s given weaknesses since they only showed mastery of one, maybe two, given objectives covered in class. In contrast, tests offer much more detailed information since they show a student’s performance on all the objectives covered in a given unit, not just a select few. Third, students still failed to take exit tickets seriously. Even when they were graded, students still chose either not to do them or to not do them with much effort at all. They rationalized that they’d just make up for the slight loss in points due to exit tickets by doing well on the test, which in the vast majority of cases never actually occurred since I pulled all my test questions from the exit tickets they had neglected to complete. All that being said, despite the changes I’ve made to how I assess my students, both formally and informally, both are still used to cater my teaching to my students’ needs. If my students demonstrate a lack of objective mastery, as evidenced by lackluster performances when called upon during cold calling and/or by poor homework and test scores, I make sure that the following classes address any and all areas of weakness. If, for instance, my students reveal to me by one of these informal or formal indicators that they do not understand in the least how to conjugate –er verbs, I’ll make sure to begin next day’s French class with some review on –er verbs before the introduction of new material. I’ll also stress to my students that because –er verbs were not fully understood in the lessons prior, they’ll be making further appearances on the tests to come. I emphasize this so that my students know that they won’t be let off the hook for not understanding a topic the first time. And while this may sound excessively cruel, especially to those students who hoped that they wouldn’t be held accountable for a particularly hard topic on more than one test, my re-emphasis of a given topic lets my students know that they might as well learn the topic once and for all, since it won’t go away until I feel that it’s been sufficiently mastered by the majority of students. Informal and formal assessments are the cornerstone of collecting student-centered data. And while my methods have remained fairly constant in some areas while having changed in others, the bottom line is that at no point in my future teaching career do I plan on no longer relying on them as a means of helping my students get the most out of their education. Informal and formal assessments both possess their inherent advantages and disadvantages, and I’m excited to see how I tailor both to my students’ needs over the coming years as I gain a more keen insight into what works, doesn’t work, and needs refinement in order to work. |