Summative Assessment

Our summative assessment consisted of multiple choice and short answer questions. We constructed our assessment in this way partly because our teacher said that she usually uses multiple choice questions and likes to include questions from past SOL tests, and partly because we wanted our students to be able to show us what they knew rather than just recognizing what they knew in a multiple choice question.

At the end of our fifth lesson, we gave our students a review worksheet that had all of the questions we asked them during the review game and an answer key to help them study for their test. We thought this would be beneficial to our students because scheduling conflicts made it so that they would not be able to take our test until almost a week after we had finished teaching the unit. We also wanted to give them a worksheet with information on it since they did not have a textbook or any other papers to look at to study. It seems a little weird to me that they do not take notes or have a book to highlight. I know I did not know how to take notes in third grade either, but now that I have been taking notes for years, I do not remember what it was like to learn, or study for a test without them. I did have a textbook in third grade to study from though. I think that getting away from textbooks is a great idea and can often make learning a lot more interesting and in depth, but I am not sure what students use to study then. Do teachers give them other information in worksheets? Or do they just remember things a lot more easily at that age?

Our students did really well on our summative assessment. Almost everyone in the class got all of the answers right and those that did not only missed one or two questions. I was really happy to see this. It made me feel good to know that our students actually did learn what we wanted them to learn and that they were able to retain the information. The only question I am left with is: does this mean we did a really good job of teaching and that our students really understood the concepts, or could it possibly mean that our test was too easy and we should have made more complex questions?

Although teaching this unit took a lot of time and effort, I really enjoyed teaching it. It makes me feel good to know that I can teach an entire unit and that my students will learn. I feel a lot more confident in my teaching abilities now!