STANDARD 5
5.1.1 Demonstrate understanding of assessment strategies, including informal and formal, diagnostic, formative and summative approaches, to assess student learning.
5.4.1 Demonstrate the capacity to interpret student assessment data to evaluate student learning and modify teaching practice.
5.5.1 Demonstrate understanding of a range of strategies for reporting to students and parents/carers, and the purpose of keeping accurate and reliable records of student achievement.
While undertaking my internship this year, I had the opportunity in term 1 to administer aspects of the Clinical Interview on my Year 2 students. Using the Mathematics data collected, I created several intervention tasks to give one-on-one support to students who performed at a lower level in the interview. While the nature of the Clinical Interview does not allow for ‘on the spot teaching’ when students misunderstand concepts, these tasks provide teachers with opportunities to suggest new strategies and address misconceptions that students may have. This is a type of ‘informal’ or ‘formative’ approach, where students receive ongoing and regular support throughout the course of several weeks (5.1.1). Research has found that “children with low levels of number knowledge make significantly more errors using counting strategies” (Bryant, 2005, p. 341). By ‘interpreting student assessment data’ from the Clinical Interview, I identified common problem areas, such as number patterns and place value, and designed my tasks accordingly (5.4.1). Since most questions in the Clinical Interview require mental computation, I ‘modified teaching practice’ with my support tasks by providing manipulatives like 100’s charts, counters, MAB blocks, number cards and place value charts (5.4.1). While the tasks were created for informal purposes, I designed a system to ‘keep accurate and reliable records of student achievement’ by writing the student’s name, the date and any observations of their strategies and behaviours (5.5.1). According to Jenkins (2010), “knowledge of how students think and reason about mathematics is a key component of pedagogical content knowledge for the teacher” (p. 149). That is why the intended ‘purpose’ of keeping these records was to identify any ‘gaps’ or misconceptions in student learning, so that we may incorporate these areas into our fluency tasks at the start of lessons (5.5.1). As shown in the artefact, I am yet to administer the second intervention task due to the remote learning circumstances, so that is my next goal moving forward.
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