Analyzing a Common Assessment Non-Success

Well, it seems it was widespread. So let's look at what we found.
1. The students aced the straight vocabulary questions.
2. When the questions asked the students to apply material in an analytical way, they went
with a practiced, memorized answer from an activity rather than looking at the new
question and thinking through the question. (jump to a familiar answer, don't think)
3. We have some test-taking issues. How to cross-reference a test, and how to use context to
produce a higher level answer.
4. We have some GREAT test takers, who marked their thought processes on the tests in
ways that showed us what led to them the precise answer they needed.

Here is a resource that we have used for a few years to help us with common assessments that's based on Marzano's research. It also has a rubric that helps to analyze the questions that a teacher is asking.

Our responses:
1. We are going to break down the objectives and do the reteaching in varied ways so that
they practice analyzing. We'll give feedback on those smaller chunks.
2. We'll put it back together a piece at a time so that we can see when we lose students and
catch them before they fall.
3. Lots of personalization. The students did well when they had used the material in a
personal way (they were great with infinitives following timeo, which means "I fear",
because we had and activity where they shared what they feared to do, but when we
replaced timeo with volo "I want", they fell apart.

Other items:
Mr. K noted that I was flying through material, and I didn't listen. He was right. I should have recognized a red flag when I incorporated venn diagrams and the students could not use the vocabulary that they had mastered to describe the relationships in the diagram. Why? Because they were not at the analysis level, they still were just memorizing. That's the flag that should have stopped me, but didn't.

Lessons learned:
Slow down. Chunk more. Check for transfer, not just recall. Things I know, and thought that I was doing, but I needed more, and these students need more. Shifting gears. I hope the transmission can handle it.

Common Assessment Meltdown

Was it me, the test, the students or can I please blame my "work husband" (the very wonderful Mr. K)?

Mr. K and I both teach 7th grade Latin at Indian Hill, and like every year, we're giving common assessments after co-planning activities, quizzes, drills, games, readings, all the same stuff. And the test was yesterday. My students took it first, on Wednesday, his took it today (a scheduling issue) and my results were dismal.

So, for 24 hours I have to wait to see if his students do better than mine (in which case it is all on me), or if it's something much more complicated. It's not often that we are caught by surprise on a test because we get a constant flow of input and give feedback daily to our students, so the fact that they did not hit the mark I was expecting (75-100% mastery), and actually fell off a cliff into a chasm (there were scores below 50%), is shocking. We started unpacking the data after school today, and will pinpoint the problem areas and reteach. But what if it's ME?

2nd period tomorrow we'll pore over the results. In the meantime, my students have received their results and completed corrections in class today, and gave me lots of feedback as we went over the questions and the answers. I have an inkling. . . but the facts will be reported tomorrow.