I spent quite a lot of time in various classrooms during the months of May and June. I've noticed a lot of time devoted to in class assessments (aka ICAs). Typically, students are given a page of problems to solve individually with the aid of their notes. In other words and "open notes quiz". These assessments are collected, scored, recorded in the gradebook and then, several days later, returned to students. The written feedback on these assessments are meaningful but take a long time to write and largely ignored by students. There has to be a better way.
I am a fan of self-checking math activities such as Add 'Em Up. In this activity, students solve three or four problems and add the solutions together. They then check this sum with the teacher to see if they are correct. If they are correct, I give the student a stamp and they can move to the next activity. If they are not correct, they can go back to review their work and look for their mistake(s). When they find it, they check their new sum with the teacher. Once they have a correct sum, they got a stamp and continued with the next set of questions. In one classroom, students were used to getting worksheets. Their routine was to complete a worksheet quickly and pass it in. Once they had finished, they were free to relax or look at their phones. When I wouldn't collect the sheet until I had stamped it as all correct they seemed preplexed and annonyed. They weren't used to caring about correctness, just completion. This changed their perspective of the goal of the work... it wasn't about completion and compliance anymore but understanding. Another class was extremely motivated by the stamps. They really liked knowing that the work they turned in was correct. I heard a few comments in the class as I walked around checking work and stamping complete papers. I wrote a few of them down to remember them:
There is a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, "“Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war." I feel like stickers and stamps are the classroom equivalent. I was surprised at how much high school students were motivated by these physical marks of success. Like leveling up in their favourite video game, it helped them feel confident and capable. When I was stamping papers, I was using the placement of the stamp to record additional information. If they got the sum correct on the first chance, I would stamp it towards the top right corner. If they needed a few hints and reminder to find their mistakes I would stamp it around the top left corner. If they need lots of support and had some conceptual misunderstandings would stamp it on the bottom half of the page. While I like using self-checking activities with this strategy, you could really do it with any small group of problems or handout. I submitted a proposal to talk about some of these immediate assessment and feedback strategies for the 2023 Northwest Mathematics Conference. I'm hoping my session gets approved. EL
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