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All material is my personal opinion, and not that of any other organization. Copyright 2001. Permission is granted for individual teacher use. All rights reserved. |
My 6th grade students come to me with a range of skills. The most important thing is that they see themselves as learners. We want to start building on their skills. But they sometimes think they have skills they don't really have, so it is important to start the year with a baseline assessment. I give the same test mid-year, and again at the end of the year. This test is a tool in having the students assess themselves as well. It is divided into discreet skills, so the students can see from their performance if they have mastered the skill in question. The second tool for this task is the Skills Inventory, where students use a "Traffic Light" to indicate their degree of confidence of a given skill. A green light indicates they have mastered the skill, a yellow light means they are working on it, and red indicates they do not understand it at all. Students save this Skill Inventory sheet for the whole year. There are four columns of traffic lights so that they can revise their self-assessment as the year progresses. I have them do the first column after they take the Basic Math Skills test in September, then the second column in January or February, after they have taken the test a second time. Students get a great deal of satisfaction when they can color a skill green, after having worked on it for a number of months. This underscores their capacity to grow and learn. As they shade skills yellow or red, they are indicating their awareness of the need to improve in those areas, and that they are responsible for their own learning. The last tool in this three-part kit is for you, the teacher. It is a modified version of the Skill Inventory sheet, with space for you to record the self-assessment data for eleven students. When you have this filled out you get a strong visual guide to the strengths and weaknesses of your class, and you can see the areas you need to emphasize in your instruction. Basic Math Skills Inventory Test (pdf file) |
