Math Profiles of Progress

February 8, 2012 | Posted in: Class Updates

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This afternoon, you will find updated math profile sheets coming home.  These sheets share with you information about how your child performs on each unit’s assessment.  The standards for each unit are graded as having mastered the skill (no mark) or not yet having mastered the skill (checkmark).  I think the strength of these profiles is that you can see, specifically, what skills your child excelled in, and what skills are still challenging.  However, a checkmark (showing lack of mastery) does not communicate on its own how your child is progressing toward mastery.  In the fall conferences, I had the same discussion with several parents: A checkmark may mean that the student has intermediate skills and that they simply are not yet proficient.  Then again, the checkmark may mean that the student has to make a significant amount of growth before reaching proficiency.

Teachers clarify this in several ways.  Some teachers mark on the score sheet the percentage correct or the total number of correct problems.  I do not do this because, as I said at the fall Curriculum Night, I don’t think seeing a simple percentage provides you with valuable data.  For example, does a 75% mean that a student correctly answered an average of three out of four problems throughout the assessment, or did he or she perform flawlessly on the whole assessment, except for one section that was completed entirely incorrectly?  To me, giving a percentage lumps together too many diverse skills into a single score.  I try to write comments next to standards that need explanation (or at the bottom), but I am also trying a new approach.

Starting in unit 4, a checkmark indicates progression toward proficiency, and an X indicates that the student needs more significant support to reach proficiency.  This will accomplish several objectives:

• You, as a parent, can more precisely see how your student performs on the assessments.
• I can be more precise in my scoring and can translate that precision into the report card grades.
• I can be more responsive to student performance and can more immediately provide support to students who are significantly struggling with a skill.  If your son or daughter has an X next to a standard, I will (or at this point, may have already) work(ed) with him or her individually, in a small group, or as part of a whole-class reteaching lesson.  If your son or daughter has a check, don’t think that I’m ignoring him or her – I may provide the same reteaching, or, if the checkmark is for a skill that we are continuing to work on, I may wait to see how his or her performance improves with continued teaching.

I hope that you find this new scoring method to be helpful for you!  Please understand that this is a trial in our classroom, and that I may continue to adjust the approach as time goes on.  If there are ongoing changes, I will, of course, let you know!