Teacher Candidate
ADJUSTMENT TO PRACTICE
CAP Element 2
CAP Element Description
Organizes and analyzes results from a variety of assessments to determine progress toward intended outcomes and uses these findings to adjust practice and identify and/or implement appropriate differentiated interventions and enhancements for students.
OVERVIEW
Assessment and information input from students are essential for practical and dynamic teachers. This input justifies the modifications teaching outputs to help teachers continually improve their lesson effectiveness. Through formal and informal testing, student growth and knowledge are measured. When assessments are utilized wisely, lessons can be adjusted daily, within a lesson, and even instantaneously as a teacher conducts a lesson. Assessments also help to adjust that same lesson to be more effective for other students at other levels. The best teachers are those that are in tune with their students’ needs and abilities. Each successful mode of assessment will tell teachers what big ideas or details about which students need clarification. It will also inform about the best practices a teacher has or which lessons need reevaluation. Overall, assessments tell a story about the effectiveness of lessons from the student perspective.
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment was much more complex and consistent throughout my classes. Each day I would have different ways of informally accessing information from students about their levels of understanding. During lectures or class discussions, I would poll the class often with questions to cause them to pause and reflect. At the beginning of my practicum, I learned that students needed time for me to pause and let them absorb the concept we were discussing while I was teaching it to them. As time went on, I found that I could better gauge their understanding and how I should pace my class. I was much more aware of their body language, and I made it common practice in all of my classes to ask students: "Thumbs up if you feel 100% confident about this topic, thumbs down if you feel 0% confident, or somewhere in the middle if you feel like you almost understand." This immediate feedback told me whether or not I needed to rephrase an idea. Often I would restate a definition or draw an example on the board to support learning in different formats.
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Small "Activators" or "Exit Slips," like the one shown below, would allow me to gauge student learning. In some cases, I used these worksheets as information only for my viewing. In other cases, I would have students peer review each other's work as a strategy for their own cognition and reflection.
 Activator for cell transport: U-TubeSource: khanacademy.com |  Activator with matching for cell transport |  Peer edited activator |
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Summative Assessment
Summative assessment are the tests students traditionally envision. These forms of assessments may be in quizzes, tests, exams, midterms, projects, or other forms of cumulative learning. Students must synthesize information from a unit and deliver outputs that show their summary of learning. These are often graded by teachers and contribute largely to the overall grade a student receives in a class.
After each unit in my class, students completed a review day or two and then took a cumulative test of the unit topics covered. Since all my students must take the biology MCAs at the end of the school year, tests were formatted as practice and preparation for the test. Almost every test was administered online unless accommodations were necessary for students with an IEP.
To create these assessments, I used online test banks of MCAs multiple choice questions and open response questions. I hand selected questions which would appropriately measure the ability of students to apply their knowledge from my class.
Adjustments in my class
Many of the students in my class struggled with the MCAs multiple choice questions. Many students failed to recognized simple details in the question descriptions, and simple questions with topics we had covered ad nauseum were answered incorrectly by even the best students. I had many doubts as a student teacher about my abilities to teach when I analyzed the results of the multiple-choice tests. In response, I kept including practice questions with the same level of difficulty on tests to measure student growth. I also had students do practice multiple choice or open response questions as part of my lesson plans. In class, we would practice multiple choice questions together and highlight the essential information in each question to strengthen student comprehension. This was a struggle I had throughout my practicum even in the last few weeks.
Also after analyzing the results of the first entirely multiple choice test with practice MCAs questions, I wanted to provide the students with a written test to see if students would demonstrate their knowledge better with the opportunity to write and achieve partial credit. Unfortunately many students floundered on this test as well. An assessment I thought was easy and a thorough assessment of the topics we covered turned out to be difficult for my students. Although some students did well and got all of the questions correct, the graphical analysis of one of my class’s data showed an even distribution of scores, all the way from 103% to 10% (included below). Since this chemistry test was created entirely by me, I adjusted many of the questions before the next classes had to take it so it would be an even fairer representation of their learning. Below is an image gallery with descriptions of the specific changes I made.
Chemistry Test Adjustments
This gallery of images shows some evidence of my adjustments to practice. This assessment was designed by me, and the annotations on each page of the test show my reasoning for including each question. Following that are student examples of Chemistry Test responses.
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Two questions proved very difficult for students, and my expectations for student performance weren't calibrated to their actual abilities. I reassessed these questions and completely removed questions 14 and 16 due to the high level of difficulty and non-explicit directions. I edited the image for question 9 for a clearer representation of a glucose molecule where the carbon atoms were written in. Some students did answer these questions correctly, however not enough students to convince me that my teaching was thorough enough for all students to understand.
Molecule Building Activity Adjustments
My students in one class struggled with creating some of the more different molecules when we were using molecule building kits. I restructured this activity to scaffold student learning in such a way that they would learn how to build more different molecules once they had the experience of building smaller molecules.
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