This year the goal of the school was to progress toward more standards based assessments and aligning assessments to common benchmarks among grade level classrooms. This was also a personal goal of mine as I have not been involved in the process of writing assessments for mathematics prior to this year. In my last school district, Everyday Math was the adopted curriculum and the tests were mandated by the district expectations and were aligned to the standards by the mathematics coaches. Writing my own mathematics assessments this year has been a difficult, but rewarding experience that has helped me to understand the standards more clearly and more purposefully align my instructional strategies to the benchmarks.
As a way to make sure that all assessments are aligned to the standards and benchmarks for third grade, I spent time going through each standard for a given area and then writing assessment questions specifically for that standard. The assessments then have the standards listed above the questions, allowing me to very clearly see which standards a student might be missing or needing more help with. I have also utilized an assessment standard checklist after the assessment to check student progress in each standard within a strand of mathematics. For example, in my Multiplication and Division unit, the student summative assessment had an attached checklist for student progress in each standard that aligned with the questions on the test.
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| Each test states the standards associated with each question! |
