Mrs.

Stephanie Davies
3rd Grade
XYZ Elementary School

Assessment
Guide

Assessment Plan
Throughout the year, I will be working with your child in various ways to ensure that we are reaching the
3rd grade standards and hitting the targets needed for your child to progress onto 4 th grade. I think that it
will be helpful for you as a parent to understand how I will determine whether your child is mastering the
3rd grade standards and how we will all work together (your child, you and I ) to make sure that he or she
is successful in my class.
To begin, I will be using various assessments in my classroom to determine not only where your child is,
but also how to move him or her to the next level. Assessments are tools that help me gather the data that
I need to make educational decisions for the benefit of your child. The decisions that are made using this
data vary but include things like:

What does the student currently know?

How can they demonstrate that knowledge?
How can we work together to eliminate educational obstacles?
What can we do to make learning fun and influence positive feelings about school?
What teaching methods should I use to make sure that your student is mastering required
knowledge targets for 3rd grade?

In the classroom, I will specifically be using selected response (multiple choice, fill in, etc), essay,
performance, personal communication and disposition assessments throughout the year. For more
information about each of these, please review the attached, Assessment FAQ. Some of these tools will
be used to develop report card grades.
In addition, your students will be asked to complete standardized tests as required by the school district,
state or federal governments. While these tests will not directly impact classroom grades, they are
important to decision makers because they determine whether or not students in general are mastering the
content required and help to make instructional decisions for future students.
All through the year, your student and I will be working on gathering evidence of their success and
growth. Some examples of this gathering of evidence are testing student knowledge via chapter tests,
individual and group projects, keeping reading logs and dialogue journals and gathering portfolios of
student work. Your child will be a key contributor to each of these assessment tools. Whether they are
working with me to identify examples of good work and bad work so that we can develop project rubrics
or identifying how they are feeling about stories read in dialogue journals, I will be taking your childs
perspective into account when making evaluations.
One of the best ways for your child to feel engaged in their learning is through the process of designing
and selecting their own materials for their educational portfolios. A portfolio is a collection of
assessments done throughout the year, chosen by your student to highlight their growth. We will use
portfolios in two ways. First, we will use a project portfolio to demonstrate evidence that the steps to
complete their classroom science project are finished on time with quality results. We will also be
compiling a growth portfolio. This portfolio will be used to demonstrate academic growth over time.
Your student will choose the assignments (for example writing samples) that will show how they
improved throughout the year.

As you can imagine, it is very exciting for students to see the difference in their work from the beginning
of the year to the end of the year and they are quite proud of their accomplishments! By choosing their
own examples, they are investing themselves in the process and taking ownership of their work. Your
child will come to value the effort that they are making for each of their assignments because they want to
see their own improvement. (For more information, see Portfolio Design Example).
The portfolios that your child puts together will contain key talking points for all of us when we get
together for conferences. I will conduct on-going student-teacher conferences throughout the year to
discuss your childs progress directly with them. In addition, we will be hosting student-led parent
conferences where your child (together with input from me) will present their portfolios to you and
discuss their progress.
When your student looks back on their third grade year, I hope that overall, they have sense of ownership
in their success. I want them to think about how they have grown and how much fun it was to see this
growth take place. I want your child to be proud of their accomplishments and to know that each child
can succeed not only in my classroom, but also in life.

Assessment FAQs
What is selected response assessment and how will we use it in our classroom this year?
When you think back to your school days, you probably remember selected response assessments. They
are either multiple choice, short answer/fill-in, true/false and matching tests. I will be using this type of
assessment throughout the year to measure not only whether your child has mastered curriculum material,
but also to work together with your child to determine what we need to do to get from where they are to
where they need to be by the end of the lesson or chapter. I believe in setting my students up for success.
In order to achieve success in my classroom, I will work with them throughout the process of learning to
identify objectives and how to reach them. One way that I will do this, is through the use of selected
response assessments early in the process of learning. These assessments will help me to work with your
student to identify areas that may need work, so that we can address them before they are tested at the end
of the lesson. Selected assessments will be very useful in determining knowledge and reasoning skills,
however, they are not as useful when assessing products or performance skills. See performance and
personal communication assessments for more information assessing these types of learning.
What is essay assessment and how will we use it in our classroom this year?
Essay assessments are often used when trying to determine how a student reasons through a complex
problem. For example, these types of assessments may be used in my classroom when I am trying to
understand how a student reasoned though a science experiment or if I would like to test social studies
knowledge by having them compare and contrast two historical figures. I will use these types of
evaluations sparingly as they can be difficult for some students and they are very time consuming to
administer and evaluate. However, the nice thing about these types of assessments is that they will allow
me to work with your child to not only practice developing essay responses to questions, but also identify
sound criteria, and learn how to appropriately apply that criterion to improve on their writing techniques.
What is performance assessment and how will we use it in our classroom this year?
Performance assessments will be used in my classroom to either allow your child to demonstrate a skill or
to judge whether a turned in product was of high quality. We will use this type of assessment most often
on special projects where your child will be asked to turn in a finished product (such as science fair
projects, a research project, or 3-D geometry models of fractions). For each of these projects, your
students will help me to design and implement the rubric to insure that they are aware of how to go about
turning in a high quality product. We will be practicing with the development of rubrics throughout the
year and evaluating what makes a high quality product vs. poor products, so that they are well aware of
what it is that they need to do to succeed. As we develop our rubrics, we will be sure to be mindful of
potential pitfalls such as unclear or incorrect performance criteria.
What is personal communication assessment and how will we use it in our classroom this year?
Personal communication assessment will also be used throughout the school year in my classroom. We
will be using such techniques as classroom discussions, student/teacher conferences, dialogue journals
and learning logs to assess learning and understanding. I recognize that some children might be a bit
more hesitant to present their ideas in front of the class, so we will be working together as a group to
create a safe environment where everyone can feel comfortable participating in some form during
classroom discussions. I will use tools like anecdotal notes, learning videos and work samples to

evidence your child's development and progression as the year unfolds.

What is disposition assessment and how will we use it in our classroom this year?
Dispositions have to do with your child's feelings, emotions, motivation and desire to learn. As you can
imagine, having a positive academic experience will be key to developing their desire to succeed in the
classroom. I will strive to create an environment where your child understands what it is that will make
them successful in my classroom by: clearly defining expected classroom behavior; fostering positive
attitudes toward learning; promoting a job well done; and working with the class to identify their interests
and incorporate those interests into our learning goals. Although assessing dispositions can sometimes be
difficult, especially if your child is uneasy about discussing their feelings, I will work one on one with
your child to ease those fears. Throughout the year, I will be sitting down with your student to gauge
their feelings about school and our classroom as well as the direction and intensity of those feelings. I
will also periodically hand out disposition questionnaires to the class to get an idea of how the class as a
whole is feeling about their academic experience in my classroom. Based on these methodologies, I will
work with your child to channel academic success, which hopefully lends itself to positive feelings about
school, learning and their academic growth.

Portfolio Design Example

This year we are going to be junior scientists! We will be conducting fun experiments in our science units
and learning how scientists document their work. Using a project portfolio is one way that we will be
gathering evidence of our progress when conducting our class experiments. As a group, we will learn
how to perform and document the experiment in stages, as we work through the scientific method.
Throughout our journey of asking a question, doing background research, forming a hypothesis, testing
the hypothesis through our experiment, analyzing our data, drawing conclusions and writing up our
results, we will be documenting our progress. This will be done by taking pictures, writing notes,
organizing data into visual aids like lists or charts and writing a lab report. We will be using our
portfolios to keep track of the evidence of each steps completion. The result will be a compilation of
each students successful completion of the project. I hope that this fun project will inspire the class to
continue wearing their junior scientist hats all year long!