ENTRY 8: REFLECTIONS ON HOMEWORK
Description of Entry:
This artifact contains a series of reflections I made regarding the handling of homework. It begins in the spring of my first student teaching experience and ends in the winter of my full time experience. Because of the way that the Connected Mathematics Project is set up, I was constantly revising my system of collecting and assessing student work.
I have also included three student completed Mathematical Reflections worksheets. These types of reflection questions are asked at the end of each investigation, and demand a lot of explaining on the students’ parts. However, reading over their responses puts a great deal of demand on the teacher’s part as well.
Finally, I have included several student-completed copies of an assignment that was a direct result of my assessment of their homework. Based on the misconceptions I had come across, I made a quiz completed by a fictional student named Richie Wrong. Their job was to correct the quiz by finding the wrong responses, stating why they were wrong, and putting the correct answers down. This forced some kids to face their misconceptions head-on, since I took several responses straight off of the homework.
Program Goals and Targets:
I demonstrated my ability to use assessment to support student learning (1D) by creating the Quiz Correction assignment based on my assessment of their previous work. My reflections on my grading experiences demonstrate my reflective practice (4D).
Reflection:
Even though I am one of its biggest supporters, I still had difficulties with the implementation of the Connected Mathematics Project curriculum. One of the areas I struggled with the most was regarding the work that students turned in. Whereas traditional math homework has only numerical answers, there is a large amount of written explanation required in the CMP. This adds a lot of extra work on the teacher’s part to assess. That is why I found myself constantly trying to decide the optimal way to assess and grade student work.
Through discussion with other teachers, I found that there were mainly three different perspectives on the assessment of CMP work. The first was to read through every student response. This was my initial approach to grading work from the curriculum. By going through every explanation that my students wrote, I could fully assess their understanding of the topics. While this was extremely valuable for my planning of instruction, it was also extremely time consuming. I began to realize that continuing with this method was not a possibility.
I then tried the opposite end of the spectrum, grading assignments based solely on completion. This involved checking the homework to see how much was done, then giving a numerical grade. This method was much less time consuming than reading through them all, but it did not allow me to assess my students’ understanding of the material.
Eventually, several veteran teachers helped me find a medium ground between the two. They suggested choosing just a select group of responses to assess, then checking the rest for completion. This involved first selecting the problems that required the most understanding, assessing those responses, quickly looking over the others, and then grading. I quickly took to the technique, as it allowed me to spend a majority of my time assessing the concepts that I found most important. This gave me a chance to get a glimpse at my students’ understanding, and not have to spend an excessive amount of time reading through all of the responses.
I believe that I have a moral and ethical responsibility in assessing students’ understanding. Without knowing if my students are “getting it”, I can neither plan nor teach my lessons appropriately. These three are interdependent steps in the instructional process, and in order to teach effectively, they must all be aligned with one another. Only after I have successfully balanced these three, can I begin to successfully meet the needs of my students.
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