"When classifying a mathematical task as "good", that is, as having the potential to engage students in high level thinking, we first consider the students - their age, grade level, prior knowledge and experiences - and the norms and expectations for work in their classroom." (pg. 344, Smith and Stein)
I found that this quote really stuck out to me while reading this article because it incorporates the essential information that is needed to be evaluated in order to fully engage a student at the level of thinking necessary to successfully learn and develop. I find it extremely important to assess a student's prior knowledge and experiences before beginning the majority of the class's curriculum and that is why I found that assessing my fourth graders using the DRAs was very beneficial. It was really interesting to see the different levels of reading that my students had. If we hadn't assessed them to find out these different levels and abilities, we would not have been able to teach to each specific ability and therefore, it would have been very difficult for all 25 of the students to be fully engaged or challenged in the curriculum and reach the necessary level of reading for their grade.
Smith and Stein provided an example of giving a task of adding five two-digit numbers together and explaining the process to fifth and sixth grade students (who had access to a calculator and feel comfortable explaining processes and their reasonsings) and second grade students (who had little prior knowledge regarding two-digit numbers and a different perception of explaining your reasoning). (pg. 344-345) The fifth and sixth grade students would be more capable to completing the task because those kinds of questions were commonly found in their daily curriculum. That level of thinking would be considered too high for a second grader to complete.
Emily-
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that pre-assessing students is very helpful. It not only helps you find out what level different students are at, but it also helps in lesson planning. You can determine which lessons you really have to hit hard and which ones you can take more lightly. In designing my math pre-assessment task I knew that I hope to find that some of the lessons we will be able to breeze through because students will already have a good handle on that topic, and some lessons we will really need to dig deeper into because students are still confused. This will help me do a better job of planning each lesson.
Nice quote!
Amy
Emily,
ReplyDeleteI also really found this quote from Stein to be very important and interesting. I think it is very important to consider the students age, grade level, prior knowledge and experiences before providing them with mathematical tasks. In order to push students’ thinking, we, as teachers, must pre-assess their knowledge. A lot of students come into the classroom with more knowledge and experiences than we initially observe or understand. Therefore, I think it is our job, as teachers, to get to know each of our students in order to promote higher level thinking. In my experience, students tend to stay engaged and participate more when the tasks are meaningful to them. Pre-assessing students knowledge and working to understand their prior experiences will increase student motivation of being active participants in the classroom.
Nice job!
Kendall