Assessment the third time around

Before I begin to talk about how I am assessing my students in math this year, I feel I have to first explain how I am planning to structure my math classroom and learning environment.

In taking on a Problem Based / Inquiry Based approach to teaching mathematics, one can appreciate the importance of providing rich, authentic and thought provoking problems and tasks where children learn the intended math by solving the problems. Over the last two years I have collected and combined many good questions and tasks. I have also discovered the wealth of problems on the NCTM website under "Teaching Children Mathematics Problem Solvers". It is here that I will base my entire year of math on.

To help keep me organized, I have read through all of the tasks that I intend to introduce this year in both Grade 5 and Grade 6 math. I have identified the big ideas, or the main mathematical concept that each of the problems will deal with. In a chart form listing all of the specific outcomes for each grade, I have listed the name of the problem under the corresponding outcome that students would be working on by completing the problem or task. This way I can tell by a glance what outcomes are being assessed for each problem, or what problem I can give a student who needs to work on a particular outcome.

This leads me to the assessment piece. As students are working on individual problems/tasks, I will identify which specific outcomes they have been dealing with and determine the level of achievement they have attained. If I feel for certain they have successfully achieved an outcome, I will use a checklist of outcomes and check off that particular outcome for that particular student. This will give me a quick way of telling which students have achieved which outcomes.

To qualify the level of achievement of these outcomes, I will continue to use my chart where each outcome that students were working on will be identified and a comment about student success of the outcome will be made. I am thinking I will try and do this for each individual problem that students complete, but I think this may get really busy and for little gain. I need to at some point communicate with parents their child's successes in math and share with them the work they have completed. I am thinking I may continue to do the chart making comments on each outcome, but will do so electronically and then once three or four activities or tasks are completed, print off the completed chart and then send it home.

For my purposes, this will solidify my own knowledge about student thinking in mathematics and more importantly provide me with evidence about students' needs.

Does this make sense?