Craft Category: Artifacts

LPS students complete mental math exercises at the beginning of class. This is a sample of the data teachers collect and analyze.

Entry into the academic numeracy classes is determined by student readiness for high school math. Sophia Thomas, teacher, talks about how LPS uses MAP assessments to assess students.

Sophia Thomas: At the start of the school year, it’s a part of what they have to do to enter the school. They have to take the MAP. A lot of kids, based on their placement, end up in my room. At the start of the year I have them set a goal based on their GLE, wherever you’re at. We are working as a class to make sure that, on average, we are all at the ninth grade level because they’re at varying places. When they started out, on average, we were in the middle of fifth grade. So, we’re working to, by the end of the ninth grade, have an average of ninth grade. That doesn’t mean that all kids are going to be at the ninth grade level but we’re really pushing for that. A lot of times when we’re starting, reference is made to that because they take it three times. They’ve done it twice already. They’re going to do it one more time at the end of the year to see where they’re finally ending up. I’ll make reference to that. We want to be at the ninth grade level. That is according to the MAP. We also want to improve on numerous skills at the same time.

Sophia Thomas, teacher, discusses how the team uses different types of assessment to gauge mastery and retention of skills.

Sophia Thomas: I was involved in creating the summative assessment. We, as a team, came together. At first, we realized that there was not a lot of rigor or depth. So, we changed all of those. There’s more writing and pushing going back to some of the things that we’re asking them to do in the writing tasks. As a team we create summative assessments. They’re not online. So, kids don’t have access to them. The same is true for the diagnostic. The formative assessments are sometimes Khan Academy missions or they’re School Yourself missions. We have a couple exit tickets admitted in [unintelligible]. Those are all our quizzes. There is one that is at the end of the unit. It’s just a cumulative quiz that goes back from all the units picking things, just to see where retention is at. One of the things that we recognized was that sometimes kids can hold on to the information for so long. Forcing them to do a cumulative quiz every time is just reminding them that they are accountable for this information.