Throughout this field experience, I had the opportunity to create tests for the classes that I was teaching (competencies 5, 8). While the average may have been lower than I had hoped for, the one that I am most proud of is my test on Systems of Equations (attached below). This evaluation did not test students on anything that we had not done in class and was a fair evaluation. As a teacher at my host school always said, tests should be easy to pass but hard to get 100%; I feel that this test fits that description quite well. For example, one multiple choice question (question 2) was about understanding a definition. We spent two full classes discussing the different situations presented in the question and they were reviewed before the test however most students did not answer correctly. After the test, many students admitted to not studying that part of the chapter because “it’s words and math doesn’t use words”. Question 6, a long answer question, was extremely similar to several questions we had done and gone over in class. Students said they understood the process perfectly and had no questions about it. Many students lost points on this question because they forgot one small detail which was emphasized by both my CT and I many times. This served as a “wake-up call” for the students, as my CT said, because they clearly did not understand the process and did not ask any questions about it; they would go on to ask more questions before subsequent tests. The final question is the only question on the test that required them to develop their own procedure. This type of question had not been seen in class however students had all of the information that they needed to solve the problem. I must admit that I was impressed with how creative the students got with solving this problem; only a small handful of students did not get full points for this question.
Question 3 posed an issue. I interpreted the question one way, some students interpreted it another, and others interpreted it differently than myself and their peers. The question gives information about 2 days of fundraising and asks how much money each person raised. The confusion was that some thought the question was asking about an average of the two days when, in fact, I was simply looking for the value of the variables. Looking back on it, I could have phrased the question differently (e.g. I could have described what the variables represented more clearly) to avoid the confusion and made sure that we had a mutual understanding of the fundraising situation before the test.
In creating this test, I had to confer with other teachers in the department to determine if it was valid and see where I could improve the test before giving it to my class (competencies 10, 11). I also had to ensure that I was writing effective questions and that I was properly communicating my thinking and how I wanted my students to interpret the questions, although as explained above, this could have been done better (competency 2).
Kevin Paquette 