Evidence Based Practices

The first assessment technique that I used during my student teaching experience was the QSI (Qualitative Spelling Inventory) from Words Their Way program. The QSI provides a picture of a students reading and spelling skills. I used this to put students into different word study groups. It helped me to understand the level understanding for each student. Words Their Way supports the Common Core Standards foundations skills. It helps students to read more complex words and understand how they are spelled. Another example of assessment that I used is the Aims Web program. This program is used school wide to test students and group them for RTI (Response to Intervention). Third through fifth grade teachers meet every two weeks and record the information during the meeting. Then students are grouped accordingly to their levels. From 9:10 a.m. until 9:40 a.m. interventions would be done, each teacher taking a different group of students. Two days of reading intervention and two days of math interventions. Groups were broken into a maximum of eight students per group. On Fridays both the math test and reading tests were done for all of the students that were in intervention groups. A quick game that I created for my students was a matching game that we used for a math lesson. Students were given index cards with the name and picture of a shape and the matching card had the definition. They were able to get up and move around the classroom to find the partner that matched them. I used this assessment as an observation to see if students were learning the vocabulary words from our math lesson. Most all of the students were able to find their partner. Once they had their partner, I had them read the word and the other partner read the definition. We used this as a math warm-up. I also used this method for other subjects as well. An assessment that I used to meet a standard was I had the students read two different books on the same topic. Their task was to create a double-bubble map comparing and contrasting the information from the two texts. The school that I student taught at is an at-risk school, so the grades that students receive are exceeds, meets, approaches, and emergent for all of the students school wide. The third grade team that I worked with had many rubrics in place for tasks like these. These types of assignments were used specifically so that the student would have grades in the grade book. All of these types of assessments are kept in a file for the teachers to use for parent conferences and then eventually sent home with the report cards.