Looking at the Unit 5 Math Assessment

March 1, 2016 | Posted in: Class Updates

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Hopefully, you’ve had an opportunity to review the unit 5 math assessment that your son or daughter has brought home to correct, have signed by an adult, and return to school.  We took our time to review the assessment over several days because, in all candor, I was disappointed by the students’ performance.  As I explained to the students, I would never share my disappointment with them if I found that they (as a class) tended to struggle with the content on the assessment.  (In cases like that, teachers should recognize that they need to go back and reteach the concepts that were challenging.  But no teacher should ever make a student feel bad for having trouble with a skill.)  In this case, I did share my disappointment, because I saw something else happening.  On this assessment, I found that many of the students lost points because they did not read and follow the directions with care.  In several instances, students answered only one part of a question while ignoring others.  There were many times in which students ignored the directions to “Show your work” or to express an answer in multiple forms.  On one question, students were asked to write a fraction to show how many items of the total are being counted, but many students just listed a number.  These mistakes tend to happen when students hurry through an assessment, fail to read whole questions, etc.  I also found that assessments were handed in with pages inadvertently left blank, and while I understand that mistakes happen, this shows how quickly and (not) deeply some students reviewed their work before handing it in.

I’m sharing this with you in hopes that together, we can help the students to build more successful work habits.  Attention to detail is a careful thing to instill in a fourth grader because, frankly, it’s often not fun to do!  Who wants to reread a question if they think they got it right the first time?  Who wants to work more slowly if they think they can do a perfectly good job moving through the task quickly.  The mistakes I’ve described here were common throughout the class, which is why I’m sharing my concerns in this forum.  In some instances, they resulted in the student’s grade being as much as 10% lower (or even lower) than what it should have been based on the student’s apparent mastery of the concepts.  Attention to detail becomes only more important in fifth grade and beyond, so this is an excellent time to help the students to become more careful, more diligent workers.  Thank you for your help, and please feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts!