Before the beginning of this school year, I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my teaching practice as a whole. In many ways, my regular day-to-day practice has radically changed to fall much more in line with what we know to be best practices in math education based on research. However, my assessment strategies have lagged pretty far beyond. Today, in my Number Sense course I am trying something new. I am curious to find out if my adjustment increases the quality of the ways my students express their reasoning, or if I have removed some of the cognitive load for them. Here's what I did.
1. I made most of the assessment very pattern-oriented. For instance, I included a number of problems like the ones below.
I found the patterns above at www.visualpatterns.org/
2. At the beginning of the quiz, I previewed the problems with the class. I also showed them a problem solving rubric that I would be using to assess their explanations of their reasoning within their problems. I kept this rubric visible on the front screen throughout the quiz.
I adapted this rubric from a
Utah Education Network website. I intentionally changed the rubric slightly to embed some Growth Mindset vocabulary in the "Not Yet" column of the rubric.
3. As students worked on the quiz, I observed them regularly looking up at the rubric. As I consider the value of this rubric, my one concern is that I may have removed a small amount of the cognitive load for my students. However, I think the rubric is general enough that it will likely serve more as a guide than a crutch for the students.
Here are a couple of samples of student work done within the rubric framework.
I'm pretty happy with the detailed nature of the work of my students. As is often the case with pattern problems, it is interesting to see the variety of ways that students see the math within the problem.
I plan to continue to inspect my assessment strategies for more ways to facilitate deeper student thinking.
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