A Beginning of the Year Math Assessment Designed With Schoology

As the upcoming school year approaches, I begin to wonder about the sun-freckled and happy faces that will be walking through my door. Fall is a season for learning as much as possible about these bright, young minds to better understand them as individuals and as a group. What are their interests? How do they prefer to spend their time? Are these new fourth graders as excited about reading as my last group? And how will they communicate with one another? What do they already know about researching? How will their attitudes and dispositions about math influence my plans for instruction?

Questions such as these will continue to float in and out of my mind throughout August. And only when I get a chance to meet and to hear from my students will I be able to gain a sense of who they are as learners. One way I begin to learn about my students and their math attitudes is by asking them for their opinions and unearthing their prior understanding. I explored several teaching sites to see what materials were already created with this objective in mind and found several resources on math disposition. Among them were surveys for the beginning of the year, state standards, and research articles. I used these to build my survey.

By incorporating the beginning of the year assessment in the Schoology content management system (CMS), I have each student's beginning-of-the-year perceptions at hand. This information can support initial math conversations with students and their families alike. When I am aware of a student's self-defined math ability, it impacts the nature of the feedback I provide them. Providing this same assessment at the end of the year also provides students with a year-long perspective of their math disposition, areas of growth, and gaps they are still working to close.

Schoology allows me to view individual student results, as well as the class as a whole. I've included our first discussion topic as well, so when students complete their beginning of the year math assessment they are already setup to interact with their peers in the CMS learning environment. When viewing the following screencast you will hear more about the students for which the assessment was designed, its purpose, curriculum alignment, and the reasoning behind Schoology.