Mathsational

Recently, I had a short twitter conversation with a teacher about eliminating formal review days before tests.  I responded that I no longer give traditional unit tests, so I also no longer do traditional review days. Instead, I give a cumulative quiz once every 4-6 school days.  These quizzes are heavy on recently learned material and light on content that was taught longer ago.  I use a form of standards based grading, so I use my gradebook every week to decide which older topics my kids need extra help with.  Those become the items added to what would otherwise be a traditional quiz.  You can read more about how I implemented standards based grading if you like. Since I also use hybrid learning, I then work a review of the older topics into my stations.  During small group instruction, I check in with students about new material and we usually practice on individual whiteboards.  I mix in a few of the targeted review content as well....

 One of the most common questions that I get about standards based grading is how I do individualized assessments.  What I do is give each kid the same really long assessment and then they individualize it on their own by choosing which questions to answer and which ones to skip.  My next post will be about how my students and I track their progress, but basically the kids know which objectives they have and have not mastered so they answer only the quiz questions that they have not mastered yet.  This method saves me the overwhelming amount of work it would be to create 150 individualized quizzes every week on my own. So here is what I do in more detail.  In an earlier post I wrote about how to create your objectives list .  I make a test bank in a separate document for every objective.  In each bank, I write 10-20 questions that measure the particular objective.  I make odd numbered items easier and even numbered items harder.  ...