With a focus on inquiry-based and cooperative learning throughout the year, assessments provided students to exercise creativity, independence and cooperation skills to show what they know. Formative assessment and documentation helped not just myself but also the students to track their learning process, strengths, and areas of growth. Summative assessments tied into our class research on multiple intelligences by catering to different learning styles and modes of expression.
Poetry: Students worked in groups of three to compose an onomatopoeic poem about an experience from their every day life (e.g. their favourite class, walking to school, waking up in the morning). This group wrote about DEAR time (Drop Everything And Read), a 30 minute period every day after lunch where students find a comfortable place to read a book of their choice and unwind. Student groups presented their poems to their class, and then put individual copies into their poetry journal. Group poems were hung around the class for the duration of the poetry unit.
Physical Education (Cooperative Games): As a summative for a cooperative games unit in PE 7, students created a cooperative game to teach to the class during our PE block. Groups of 2-3 were allowed to use any equipment in the gym to either adapt a cooperative game they already knew, or create something new from their imagination. Guidelines were safety, teamwork and cooperation PLOs from the IRP. Students had to submit their lesson plan to me for review and feedback before teaching their game to the class. I provided written feedback for each lesson plan/game on a sticky note, and they then had an opportunity to incorporate suggestions. They were encouraged to consider not only the rules of their game, but also lesson delivery and classroom management strategies since they were the ones teaching their game to the classmates. The games that came out of this summative were very creative — I’ll be incorporating some of them into my future cooperative games units!
Chemistry: At the end of an 8 week unit on Chemistry, I designed a three part summative assessment. There were many different learning styles in the classroom, and the material we covered didn’t necessarily lend itself to one type of assessment to get a snapshot of students’ learning, and I wanted to give students the opportunity to show what they know in as many different ways as possible. Students wrote a formal lab report based on a density experiment they conducted in small groups, wrote a chemistry quiz, and created their own chemical compound/element.
Students got to exercise their creativity and knowledge of chemistry by describing a “newly discovered” chemical compound/element’s density, state of matter, solubility, common uses, etc., and including an illustration and elemental symbol. The creativity and understanding exhibited by each and every student for this assessment blew me away. Many did their own research to provide detailed in depth descriptions and analyses; for example, this student wanted to describe an element with a chemical structure simpler than hydrogen, and ended up “discovering” an antimatter substance!
Student conducting density experiment and recording observations and procedures for lab report
A newly discovered element