Assessment and Grading
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Overview
Determining what academic material students have learned and understand is important for planning instruction, for assigning grades, and for evaluating the quality of a school's mathematics program.
While information gathered for one of these purposes may also be useful for other purposes, this is often not the case; for example, external tests can provide information that school boards and the public often find useful for judging the quality of schools, but such tests are unlikely to provide information that teachers can use to plan instruction for individual children.
One of the first principles of good assessment practice is to use multiple sources of data. Everyday Mathematics provides many assessment tools that can be used both for planning instruction (formative assessment) and for assigning grades (summative assessment).
Almost all of the information from these tools can be useful for planning instruction; assessment opportunities that can also be useful for grading are often labeled “fair to grade.”
Assessment opportunities in Everyday Mathematics fall into two broad categories:
- Ongoing Assessment: This is a regular daily and weekly assessment, and much of it is based on students' regular class work. Ongoing assessment provides a steady stream of information about students' progress.
- Periodic Assessment: These are special assessment
events
that happen from time to time in the program. Every unit, for example, includes a Progress Check lesson with several types of periodic assessment opportunities.
As teachers and math coaches make assessment decisions, we recommend using:
- the various opportunities in the Progress Check lesson: the oral and slate assessments, the written assessment, the open response task, and the student self-assessment.
- the many other assessment opportunities in each unit, including the Recognizing Students Achievement tasks found in every lesson.
Each of these assessment opportunities provides a snapshot of what students know at any moment. Taken together, these snapshots create a moving picture that can help teachers assess whether a student is on track to meet the Grade-Level Goals.
*See grade level specific Assessment Handbooks for unit assessment overviews.
