The A Word (Assessment)

CBC (Dec. 16, 2011). Mr. D | Mr. D | CBC. Video. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fn_vAhu_Lw.

Mr. D clearly knows what he's doing. Just scribble some numbers and words on a page, maybe circle a few things, and throw a number on the top. Marking is so easy, am I right?!

Hmmm... not quite....
Assessment is a whole lot more than just throwing some numbers and words on a page for students. Assessment is how students learn, and how students grown. So how exactly are they going to develop if we just give them a 75%? Like I said, there's way more to it.

The most important part about assessment is descriptive feedback. Giving students the tools to learn from what they have completed is possible only if you tell them how and where to improve. Descriptive feedback incorporates a couple of different key components. There are a number of important factors for assessment that are outlined in the Growing Success document. First, outline what the students have done well. Make some direct links to what students have succeeded in. Not only will it help to develop their confidence, but you're also telling them what to keep doing in the future. Second, let them know where they can improve. This doesn't mean tearing their work to shreds and outlining every single detail they got incorrect. Show the students that there are always things to work on, and help them see what they need to keep working on. One of the most important things we always talk about in math is the ability to make mistakes and struggle - this means that you're learning. So if students are guided on how to improve their work in the future, they will also continue to learn.

No, descriptive feedback is not as easy as throwing a number on everything. But you don't have to do it for every little thing your students hand in. It's about quality, not quantity.

While I was in my placement last year, my students were working on graphing. I got them to create some bar graphs and hand them in to me. I took some time to go over the graphs and provide descriptive feedback based on the success criteria we had co-created. Don't get me wrong... this took a fair chunk of time. However, I wanted to see how the students were doing, and where they needed to go. So, after writing what seemed like a novel (not actually of course!) for each student, I handed them back their graphs so that they could read the feedback. The next day in class, we continued to work on creating graphs. At the end of the class, I got the students to hand their bar graphs in again, and what happened was magic. Almost every single student had made a perfect bar graph!

After this experience with my students, I talked to them to see how they had improved so much, so quickly. Every single one of them said that it helped to have had me look closely at their graphs, and go through what they succeeded in and what needed to be improved on. Essentially, the students used my feedback as another checklist help them through their work.

So, to wrap it all up, don't be a lazy marker. Give your students assessments that will help them grow as learners. If you put the effort in to marking and caring about your student's success, then they will be successful. It's (almost) as simple as that!