I think the hardest part of coming up with a new form of summative assessment is balancing measuring the concepts you want students to learn while also measuring the quality of the product that students give you. I believe most teachers go for a test as a form of summative assessment (at least in math). I know I do. I do this because I know there is little ambiguity in what I am actually measuring. I know for a fact that on question 1, I am trying to see if students know how to solve differential equations. I designed a project for my IM3 class where they needed to use exponential functions to predict how much mortgages and students loans would cost per month, based on what school they went to and what career they predict they were going to have. I also am basing this on where they want to live, etc. Here is where ambiguity comes into play for the final grade. I am measuring whether or not they calculated their student loan payments and mortgage payments based on their exponential functions. That makes up the majority of the project 30/50 points. The other 20 points I am measuring though is the quality of their project, whether or not their sources were valid, the tax brackets they used to determine their monthly income, and so on. This is where I am left with this feeling of am I being fair and what I am measuring. This project covers many standards than just the ones I taught for that given chapter. The chapter I taught we learned about exponential functions and I want to see if they know how to use these to solve real world problems. However, this summative I created is also measuring other standards which I didn't spend the bulk of class time teaching. This is basically the problem that I see, which is why many math teachers have an issue with straying away from the traditional tests. Even if you gave them a set project problem where they are only using one standard to solve a given problem, it is basically doing the same thing as a test but you just gave it the title of project. If you want the project to be more applied and you want students to create something, then you have to have a means of measuring the quality of the product that students are making. Another problem that I myself have as a teacher has to do with the fact that the understanding of students is going to be measured through tests. Whether it is the AP Test, CMAS, PSAT, SAT, all of these are tests that students have to take and that is ultimately how other institutions are going to measure how much they know. This leaves me with two controversial view points. One, I want to have projects in my class where students actually understand how math works and they have fun doing it. However, these projects take way more time than just a standard test and it ultimately is not preparing them for the measurements they will have to take. If I were to give them many test emulating forms of assessment then they will have more experience taking tests and will be more comfortable with the forms of measurement that are used by the state, nation, and colleges. Math is tricky. I believe alternate forms of assessment are good for math classes because it gets the students involved and more willing to actually learn the material. However, there is still the nagging idea in the back of my mind that tells me I'm not preparing them as well as they could be prepared for taking these tests because time they are spending making a cute presentation or project could be used teaching test taking strategies or just getting them more comfortable in a test taking setting. I guess everything has a trade off.
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December 2019
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