Danielle C.

Hicks
Elementary School Curriculum and Assessment
Mrs. Wright
November 15, 2014
Assessment Inventory
Mr. Moss uses a variety of forms of assessment in his classroom.
The three types that he uses are pre-assessments, formative and
summative assessments. He uses pre-assessments to see what the students
already know and what areas in the lesson he needs to focus on the most.
Sometimes he will ask them simple questions or he will give them a pretest. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to
feedback that can be used by the teacher to improve their teaching and
to improve the students learning. More specifically, formative
assessments help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and
target areas that need work. Also formative assessments are typically
low stakes. The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student
learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against

some standard or benchmark. Summative assessments are generally high

stakes.
In the classroom the forms of formative assessments Mr. Moss uses
are exit tickets, and a variety of questioning strategies. The idea of the
exit ticket is that students need to answer a question in order to leave
the classroom. Many students seem to like this closure activity because it
gives them a chance to display the information that they learned in class
that day and it also shows Mr. Moss how much they learned from his
lesson. While teaching Mr. Moss will informally assess the students by
asking questions such as: What is the main idea? What are the key words
for addition? Is there anything that you do not understand? Mr. Moss
interprets the data that he receives by giving the class formative
assessments and he can see what areas the students are strong in and
what areas he needs to reteach so that the students will have a better
understanding of them.
Summative assessments are given to the all students in the form of
quizzes, chapter tests and final projects. Often times Mr. Moss would set
aside Fridays to give the students summative assessments. They would
often times be given a variety of quizzes and test to complete so that he

could better assess their level of knowledge. The students seemed to

dislike the idea of paper test but, they were excited when they were
allowed to take some of their quizzes and test on their IPads or the
SMART board. The majority of the tests were multiple choice because
multiple choice tests are easy to grade and by administering this type of
test Mr. Moss can provide prompt feedback to the students on how well
they did. On a couple of the tests the whole class did poorly so Mr. Moss
decided that he was going to take a different approach to re-teaching the
lesson. After he retaught the lesson he retested the class and they did
much better.