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Portfolio as an assessment
Portfolio as an assessment
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Mathematics: A New Kind of Portfolio Assessment
I sat pondering in my classroom as I calculated my grades for my first six weeks of teaching. I began wondering as I looked over grades how accurate these grades were to the ability of my students. I began to wonder how the grades showed the growth from where some of my students started at the beginning of the year. Some of my students started below grade level to begin with and had made tremendous gains to function at the level they were functioning at. However, with the traditional grading system, it tests how much they know at the sixth grade level. According to this grading system, these students were still failing or minimally passing.
This situation began to bother me and I remembered back to when I had read about portfolio assessment in my language arts blocks in college. I began to wonder if portfolio assessment could be more effective than this traditional approach to assessment. If it is more effective, why is that? As I was thinking about this, more reflections came to me such as, how does portfolio assessment take into consideration the way students learn and what have theorists said about learning and assessing mathematics. Furthermore, I needed to know if this assessment could even be applied to my own teaching.
Background
In the last decade there has been a call for more authentic assessment from across all content areas. The question has been, is portfolio assessment the answer? Koca and Lee talk about the benefits of portfolio assessment over traditional assessment in mathematics. Their view focuses on how traditional assessment takes away the “mathematical tasks of reasoning, communicating, and problems solving.” They take a brief stance on this p...
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...Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
Martin-Kniep, Giselle (1998), Why Am I Doing This? Purposeful Teaching Through Portfolio Assessment, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
Polya, George, (1957) How to Solve It, Princeton University press, Princeton, NJ.
Schoenfeld, Alan (1988), “When Good Teaching Leads to Bad Results: The Disasters of ‘Well-Taught’ Mathematics Courses,” Educational Psychologist, 23 (2), 145-166.
Shaklee, Beverly, Barbour, Nancy, Ambrose, Richard, and Hansford, Susan (1997) Designing and Using Portfolios, Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights, MA.
Skemp, Richard 91987), The Psychology of Learning Mathematics, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillside, NJ.
Sousa, David (1995), How the Brain Learns, National Association of Secondary School Principles, Reston, V.A.
Sunstein, Bonnie and Lovell, Jonathan (2000), The Portfolio Standard, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
The second part of this memo contains a rhetorical analysis of a journal article written by Linda Darling-Hammond. Interview The following information was conducted in an interview with Diana Regalado De Santiago, who works at Montwood High School as a mathematics teacher. In the interview, Regalado De Santiago discusses how presenting material to her students in a manner where the student actually learns is a pivotal form of communication in the field (Personal Communication, September 8, 2016).
Smith, E. E. and Kosslyn, S. M. (2009). Cognitive psychology: Mind and brain. New Jersey: Pearson Education
Smilkstein, Rita. We're Born to Learn: Using the Brain's Natural Learning Process to Create Today's Curriculum. Thousand Oaks, Cal. Corwin Press, 2003.
Reconstruction failed to bring justice, social and economic equality to freed Blacks. Reconstruction may have bought freedom to slave but it only caused more horror in their life. Many of the trauma caused by reconstruction is shown in documents D, E, and F. Reconstruction was not all a failure to the African-American community it cause them to gain some type of equality in the American society. Example’s of the positive effect of the reconstruction is shown in documents A, B, and C. Reconstruction had both a negative and positive effect on the social class of African-American in the United States.
The Union was victorious in the Civil War in 1865, although much of the South had been destroyed in the process. The period after the Civil War is known as the Reconstruction period which lasted until 1877. During this period, the rebuilding of the South began. The federal government set conditions that the Southern states would have to abide by in order to enter back into the Union. One of the conditions of the South’s re-admittance into the Union was that there must be civil and political equality for blacks. This meant that governments and social systems had to be re-established in these states. Freedom became a source of conflict during the Reconstruction of the South. It brought about different meanings for black Southerners than it did
Reconstruction was a time of major change for African Americans. This included economic, social, and political progress. Reconstruction was beneficial to everyone, even though African Americans were the ones who benefitted the most. A public school system was established to give equal education to all children, no matter their age, race, or color. The Southern economy had to be rebuilt after the Civil War. An interracial democracy was introduced into politics. People have said Reconstruction is responsible for reuniting the United States. For the first time in our history, African Americans felt like they were wanted and had a purpose in the United States.
Walkup. (2008). Learning and Cognitive Development. In B. a. Kay, Advanced Early Years (pp. 132 - 149). Harlow: Heinemann.
By nature, most students are brought up in an academic environment motivated to get A’s and B’s on their report cards. Those grades sometimes don’t thoroughly report how much a student has learned or gained knowledge in each topic. Some instructors throw in factors totally unrelated to learning, when the main objective of academic institutions is to learn. In order to clearly demonstrate how much a student has learned in the classroom, schools should change their current grading system and teach students how to learn.
Teachers have always used grades to measure the amount a student has learned. This practice is becoming ineffective. Many students have a wide range of grades, which show that grades may not show what a student really knows. Therefore, the standard grading system should be replaced. Some reasons why grades should be replaced are bad grades can hinder a child’s performance, grades define who a student is in the classroom, and grades are not an effective way to see if students have learned the material. The current grading system should be upgraded and every school should incorporate the plus/minus system in their method of grading.
...ld. Women are most often stereotyped as only being nurses or other lower-end health professionals. There is a huge difference between the percent of males and the percent of females when it comes to more advanced medical fields. A study conducted by Reed and Fischer found that women are not promoted at the same rate as men in medical fields. They feel that women are under-represented in higher medical positions. The CEJA found that there is a large difference in salaries between men and women. Studies show that the average female physician earns 34 percent less than her male counterpart. Female physicians are more likely to earn a relatively low income and are less likely to gain a relatively higher income. For example, while 19 percent of female physicians earned less than $60,000, only 7 percent of male physicians earned less than that same amount (CEJA, 1994).
Grades and number scores have been the system for centuries, but critics and experts debate that a new system should be put into place, where teacher comments will track a kid’s progress in school. Instead of a vague number or letter score, students and parents will get detailed descriptions from the teacher. There are many sides to this story, and experts are debating over which system should be used. I think that grades shouldn’t be abolished, because they are easy and simple, measure the progress of students, and give students motivation.
Towers, J., Martin, L., & Pirie, S. (2000). Growing mathematical understanding: Layered observations. In M.L. Fernandez (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Tucson, AZ, 225-230.
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...
Portfolios serve the purpose of an extensive record of a student’s best work and skills. As the student progresses through life, record keeping and reflection becomes an expectation. A résumé cannot possibly describe the entire list of qualities each individual possesses. As a result, portfolios thrive in high schools and offices alike to demonstrate a person’s capabilities in the greatest detail. Any person with a future-oriented mindset should have a portfolio to create opportunities for a successful life.