Active Assessment in the Philippines

feny de los angeles-bautista
teachfen@philonline.com

Questions:

How do you go about assessment?

How is assessment integrated into further learning?

What do the changes in the focus mean?

In each of my math classes I usually spend the first weeks of classes in June providing my students with tasks or activities that will tell me more about their mathematical skills and thinking skills, and about the concepts and topics which they remember and those they seem to have forgotten after two months of summer vacation.

While the students accomplish individual tasks I observe how they tackle different types of problems. I pay particular attention to the types of mistakes a student commits. These mistakes help me understand how a child thinks. Group activities or games tell me how a child is able to use or apply skills or knowledge he learned during the previous school year. I also try to observe the modality or modalities a child uses while learning a new game or lesson.

Based on the information I gather during the first weeks I go over the math curriculum again. I make adjustments in terms of the topics or skills the students need to learn first. Since children are at different levels and since they need to begin at different levels, I group the children according to skill levels. For instance, in a fifth grade class I may be teaching the whole class about multiplying whole numbers, but children may belong to a group that is working on 1 digit multipliers, or to a group that is working on 2 digit multipliers. During the week I give the children time to work or play with children who belong to other groups. In the same fifth grade class, children of different skill groupings play games such as Math Checkers to help them continue to master basic multiplication facts.

After a lesson, I usually give the children 3-5 practice tasks within a span of two to three weeks. These tasks provide the children enough time and opportunity to master a skill or concept. I then give the children an assessment task, which we usually call a quiz. The results of the quizzes tell me what to do next. When I go over the kinds of mistakes the students make I usually am able to tell if the child needs more time to master a certain skill and thus needs more practice tasks, if the child just needs to pay more attention to details (e.g. writing a dot or point to separate whole numbers and decimals or the appropriate geometric symbol or on top of the letters AB to differentiate line AB from line segment AB), or if a child can move on to the next topic or to a higher skill.

After 8-9 weeks of classes our school gives the children quarterly exams or assessment tasks. These exams help me evaluate the children's long term memory as well as their ability to apply skills and concepts they learned during the quarter. Aside from the new lessons lined up for the next quarter, I provide practice or mastery tasks about topics we tackled during the previous quarter. Such tasks help my students remember processes or rules which they would otherwise forget.

Sometimes, however, there are some students who have difficulty retrieving information when they are asked to, particularly during an assessment. For instance, last October I gave my fifth grade class their assessment for the second quarter. After checking the papers I was surprised to see that one of my students was not able to correctly answer the entire test. These results did not match the work he was able to accomplish during the whole quarter. I discussed the results of the test with my student, showed him his paper and asked what had happened. He simply said that during the assessment period he forgot what to do and because during assessment time children are asked to work independently, he could not ask any of his classmates to help him. I then gave him the same test. This time, however, I gave him verbal cues such as "What do you need to do next?" or "Then what do you do?" After giving such cues for the first two items of each part of the test, he was able to finish the entire test. He almost got a perfect score for his second quarter assessment. In this case, my observations and the results of this student's efforts during the entire quarter told me more about what he really could do and what he really knew.

I believe that teachers' observations and the students' daily work make up the cake. Quarterly assessment is usually just the icing on it.