My Worst Assessment

The most disheartening sight, to me, is sitting down to grade an End of Unit assessment that we spent months on and having most of the scores fall below 75%. I can only imagine the myriad of responses I’ll get from my students. Some will be completely surprised and disappointed because they don’t usually get those scores, let alone on a test, while others will admit that they had no idea what they were doing or feel demolished because they really thought they were starting to grasp it this time. This is the moment I knew that this unit test was my worst assessment.

In years past, our module covering multi-digit division, computing decimals, and dividing fractions has always been one that my 6th graders struggle with. Once we finish it and move on, everything else seems easier by comparison simply because there was so much hardship overcome in that single unit. It got to the point where I would get myself stressed out before we got to it and would try to brace myself for a month of mistakes, students contemplating just giving up, and my attempt to constantly reassure them while trying to cover their mistakes before they happen. I really thought I had it this year. Warning them ahead of time so they wouldn’t be caught off guard, we slowed down our pacing and took our time. I would go over common misconceptions using my pedagogical content knowledge, dig into “why” we do what we do to find our answers, go over multiple different strategies, and give all of the sayings I could think of to help everything stick.

My students were great during this trying time. They would support their peers if they needed it, ask more questions than usual to try and better their understanding, and even ask for me to pull them during my prep hour to get extra help. Once we got to our study guide, most of them took their time and scored decently well. I was convinced that we got through it this time and they would knock this test - that was nearly a carbon copy of the study guide they completed - out of the park. I was wrong. I thought we did everything right. Everything we did leading up to the summative assessment was student focused. In correspondence with what Montenegro and Jankowski (2017) highlight, we had “student involvement throughout the entire assessment process including the development of learning outcome statements, assessment tool selection/development process, data collection and interpretation, and use of results” (10). 

Perhaps, as described by Shepard (2000), my students were stuck within the “close relationship between truly understanding a concept and being able to transfer knowledge and use it in new situations”(11). Maybe I was looking for success where I could find it, letting my confirmation bias take over, and not slowing down on pacing as much as I needed to. Even though we all suffered a disappointment in our results, it was a learning moment for all of us in that classroom that one test cannot truly show once and for all what you know. We all saw firsthand the growth that we made during that unit, and how that difficulty brought the classroom together.

References:

Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14.

Stommel, J. (2021). Grades are dehumanizing; Ungrading is no simple solution. Jesse Stommel. https://www.jessestommel.com/grades-are-dehumanizing-ungrading-is-no-simple-solution/

Wix. Headache  [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_ebf791758f174574942ccbfbd5fe9f99~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_665,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_ebf791758f174574942ccbfbd5fe9f99~mv2.jpg

Wix. Learning pod  [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_5832eed02a9a43f6a75eba854c34432a~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_5832eed02a9a43f6a75eba854c34432a~mv2.jpg

Wix. Teamwork [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_d030b321d906443083f03553d968095b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_d030b321d906443083f03553d968095b~mv2.jpg