Collecting Data and Evidence

Begin to collect evidence and data and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline students data and evidence.

On Tuesday 23 March the government announced that the Education sector would be going into Alert 3 Lockdown. At the time I had planned to do GloSS, Basic Facts testing as well as conduct a survey, all to be completed by the end of Week 8 of Term 1. This did not happen.

The PAT testing was completed well before the Lockdown and I am still waiting for the results to be imported from NZCER marking to our SMS.

Therefore, I have at this moment no evidence nor data to share.

I tried to conduct a survey during a Hangout Meet this week but only one child turned up and then he quickly left. At another meet there were only 2 students. Moreover, I am unable to reach half of the students who have no access to a device during the Lockdown.

I have decided that it is not a feasible task to undertake and I hope to complete the survey when all the students return to school, as well as testing them.

Tools, Measures and Approaches

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

To get a more detailed and accurate profile of the students' learning I need to think about the different assessment tools available to me and the methods I need to use to acquire information about student learning. These methods include both formative and summative.

Available summative assessment tools at my school include:

• PAT maths
• GloSS
• Basic Facts
• pre and post assessment

PAT, GloSS and Basic Facts are school -side test that are conducted twice yearly at our school and has been part of the summative school assessment for a very long time.

PAT Mathematics "helps teachers determine their students' levels of achievement in the knowledge, skills and understanding of mathematics in the New Zealand curriculum. It is directly alined with the New Zealand Curriculum and targets the big ideas students need to understand in order to make progress." (Source: NZCER PAT Mathematics)

While GloSS, "provides a series of questions to identify the strategy stage a student is operating at on each of the three startegy domains of the Number Framework." (Source: NZmaths Assessment tools)

Lastly, basic facts is a necessary test to carry out. If we look at the basic facts concept map, we see that basic facts is the core to the various conceptual understanding and knowledge in mathematics.

(Source: Assessment Resource Banks)

Pre and post test: I like doing pre-test because I can find out how much knowledge the students have before the start of their maths topic learning while post-test has a dual purpose. For the student, it is to see if they have increased their knowledge and understanding of their learning and for me, to see fi my teaching approaches and programme are appropriate and challenging.

As for the formative assessments they include:

• survey
• observation
• feedback
• conferencing
• workbook
• OTJ

Its' important to know how students feel about maths and a simple survey of their thoughts and attitude can reveal a lot about the issues and problems students face with maths.

As teachers we regularly observe and evaluate our students in many different settings. We look at behaviours and actions, and we listen to the conversations that take place in and out of the classroom. When we are in the classroom our eyes are constantly roving making sure every one is learning and on task and everything is fine.

I like using feedback because it helps students to focus on a particular knowledge,, skill or strategy that needs to improve and corrected.

I also like conferencing because it give me time-out with each student. It allows me to get to know the learner, understand the finer details of the learner's knowledge and skills and to cater to the learner's needs.

Going through a learner's workbook is also important as it allows me to see where the missteps are in a learner's strategy, method or calculation and to pinpoint learning areas that need to be worked on.

Lastly, bu combining the aforementioned summative and formative assessments, I can more accurately make an OTJ about my learners during report writing time.