Part 3 Delivering an assessment and looking at the

I found that when students have multiple assessments within their assessment window, students are able to start other performance matter assessments they are assigned to even if the assessments are hidden on Schoology.  Through trial and error we determined over exam week that either not assigning the assessment to students until the day of the test or restricting the assessment window after assigning the test stops this problem from occurring.

Grading the assessment was easy.  We used the assessment as a digital bubble sheet because of some of the limiting features in the PM sketch box compared to students working on paper.  There was also not a way to make self-grading multiple choice questions where students would be permitted to draw on the screen freely.  Once we had the assessment hand scored, we graded each test by student to input the results.  Results were easy to see across all students.  I have not yet figured if there is a way to sort the students by class, not just my entire course load of students listed alphabetically.

I've actually only ever used Schoology for my digital assessment tools so it's the only tool that I am familiar of. I like the idea of creating items to store in banks accessible by the department. Especially in the case of ENL, we teach many of the same units so it would be beneficial to have access to these items. Additionally when co-teaching, it would be beneficial to have access to the same tools that the gen ed teachers are using to assess the students. This would be beneficial to help differentiate for ELLs.

Having used Desmos as our math curriculum this year, I found that using any other type of platform in addition to Desmos was more than I was willing to take on.  Having created an assessment in Performance Matters, I have a lot more confidence in merging the two together.  The one thing I found would be a helpful feature is for students to be able to erase when solving a math question.  There is an "undo" button and a "clear all" button, but if they are showing their work for math, they can't erase a certain portion without undoing the section they were working on.  Once I got the hang of it, creating questions and pushing it out to students was easy!  Once it is created, I can use it in years to come.

I was amazed at how easy it was to grade extended response questions.  I have found myself not wanting to use Schoology assessments, as I do not find it to be as user friendly for extended "show your work" math questions.  The opposite was true with Performance Matters.  Grading was super smooth and quick.  I liked how I could grade by question or by student, which was great for initial grading and then when I had a late submissions.  

I think having a bank of questions is extremely helpful. In my position I work on curriculum that is below grade level. If elementary schools are putting their questions for assessments then I am able to see what the difficultly of the questions are and I am able to use some of those questions in my classes as well. If I make a remedial test for my students that uses elementary standards then they can also see what questions I created and they can utilize them too. This is great because since we are in different buildings I would never normally get to see what they are creating and vice versa. 

I noticed that the performance matters will be helpful to make a bank of questions - easily shared. I wish there was a way to transform schoology quizzez already made to PM .The assessment is presented to students min away that more aligns with CBT

Although the building of questions and assessments is a lot of work at first, I can see how having these banks at our fingertips year after year could be really beneficial.  With the shift to CBT in all subject areas this year, students need to become more fluent in the online testing environment.  These online assessments also grade themselves! They are easy to deliver through Schoology and give student practice in the the digital testing environment.  As with anything, I imagine as you make more items it becomes easier. 

I was able to have my Global 10  students complete a short multiple choice quiz on the Industrial Revolution prior to taking our Unit Test.  This was a nice benchmark and way for me to immediately receive feedback on what information the students had mastered and what needed to be revisited/retaught. Performance Matters reminds me a lot of Castle Learning and Problem- Attic which our Department has used to create assessments.  While these sites have banks of multiple choice and CRQ questions from Regents exams, it was nice to have the ability to modify questions and tweak the question choices, styles, etc. It would be very beneficial for our PLC teams and departments to begin building question banks for future use; however, this would be an extremely time consuming task for us to conquer for our many unit tests and styles of assessment.

It's nice to be able to see the results from the test taken on performance Matters and I love the use of assigning the assessment through Schoology.  I do not like the tools that are offered for short response questions.

For this portion of the badge evidence I created a brief assessment on the French Revolution to use as a formative assessment and skills tool for CRQ style questions.  My students did it to conclude a lesson and I was able to get immediate feedback on their understanding and areas of weakness.  This was a brief check for understanding, but based on the way the results were reported and the data that is generated I feel like this will be an extremely valuable tool for larger scale unit tests.  I find this tool similar to Castle Learning in how the standards are applied and data is generated.  I do like the flexibility in independently creating your own questions and bank for future and more targeted use.  I like the ability to manipulate wording and order things to suit my students needs.  I also love creating my own specific bank or Sweet Home bank to pull from in the future with standards already tied to it.  This will be labor intensive in creating a variety of questions from scratch and tying in standards the first time.  But in the long run this is a very valuable tool for student exam preparation and for teachers to plan lessons after analyzing data to best suit their needs.  I can see my PLC team working to build formal assessments and check for understanding tools in the future for sure.