Integer choice assessment part 2

The other day I posted a work in progress–an assessment menu for adding and subtracting integers. Matt Coaty’s comment inspired me to explore how students would share their understanding, as well as develop assessment criteria.

Today I’m unveiling a new and improved version. I’ve taken the idea of a literary book club meeting where students bring a discussion tool to talk about a novel and have turned it into a “Mathematics Symposium” where students bring activities they’ve created about a concept and share their mathematical understandings with the group.

Here’s a revised 2-5-8 menu with descriptions of the criteria for success, suggested product ideas, and a check on whether students have met the expectations, or if they are not yet there.

Each student will have up to ten minutes to share their activities. When the group is finished they will assess each other using this two sided rubric/checklist. If a student marks any area as superlative (italics) they are to indicate on the reverse side what distinguished it from the other choices.

To determine a “final” grade, I’ll review the artifacts along with the students’ input. I’ve successfully used this format when I taught literature and it was quite successful. I’m looking forward to seeing how this translates in a math class.

 

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Standards based choice assessment

For the past couple of years our math curriculum committee has been focusing on creating performance based assessments with leveled problems. Now that we have a clear vision of the standards and what we want our students to know and be able to do I want to start offering some variety, some choice.

I’m toying with the idea of offering choice once per quarter. Here’s a 2-5-8 menu I created for adding and subtracting integers.

In addition to the differentiated content, I like how this format requires the student to do much more thinking and problem solving because they have to come up with their own scenarios and problems. Even the Knowledge and Comprehension levels ask students to think.

One element that is missing is differentiating by product. What options do you suggest? Ideally they shouldn’t take hours to assess. Also if you have other activities to suggest or other input please comment.