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  • Busy Engagement vs Intellectual Engagement

    Busy Engagement vs Intellectual Engagement

    There is a difference between being intellectually engaged and being busy.

  • Assessing the Concept of Addition

    Teaching students to add appears to be a very linear, skill driven endeavor. Hidden in this is the concept of what it means to add and how to assess this conceptual understanding. Here is an approach to address and assess the concept of adding. In the photo above a student is prompted to pull both…

  • Targeting Gaps in a Math Topic

    A key to intervention for math is to drill down into a topic to see which step is causing a student problems. This is a big reason why ongoing progress monitoring is vital to intervention. In this case a student in a previous session had occasionally added the percent to the dollar amounts – the…

  • Assessment of a Math Objective

    Assessment of a Math Objective

    List all the steps for the objective. Use this table (above) as a pretest to identify gaps. Provide instruction on the gaps. In the photo below I used color coding to show what to multiply and scaffolding to align the digits in ONES and TENS place. NOTE: I provide the problems with some steps already…

  • Pretest on Money and Spending for Consumer Math

    The photo shows a pre-posttest for a student in a consumer math class. In the course I taught we would conduct a pretest at the start of the class to determine which of the related skills a student lacked mastery. The course focus for this student was on the identified skills – highly individualized. The…

  • Making Formative Assessment Formative

    The photo at the top shows a portion of a cumulative formative assessment for a student in algebra 1 part 1. At the bottom is a handout with problems aligned with the formative assessment. A copy is made for each student and the student is assigned (using highlighting) problems on this follow up handout that are aligned with…

  • Assessment for General Curriculum Math Topics

    In special education there is a tool called a task analysis. It is a formal approach of identifying the steps taken to demonstrate mastery of a skill. For example, putting on shoes with Velcro straps involves the following steps: get shoes, sit on chair, match shoes with feet (right to right), insert foot into respective…