Tristan Stockford

10/27/2016
Math Journal Entry
Assessment Strategies
I found that most of the assessment strategies listed in this chapter were strategies that I
already knew about and plan on implementing, such as formative vs summative assessment,
student self assessment, journal writing, Interviews, analyzing student homework,classroom
observations and communication during class, and portfolio assessment.In fact, there were
really only two methods that were somewhat new to me, namely performance-based
assessment, and process compared to product-oriented assessment. To be honest both
methods sound like effective methods, but Im not sure that they would be something that would
work for me as use in assessing my students. In the case of process oriented assessment, the
description given in the book is just not informative enough for me to even fully comprehend
exactly what the form of assessment would look like, especially in a math environment as
assessing in math classes tends to be more difficult than in say english, history, science, or art
classes. I like the idea of performance-based assessment. I think that currently we are creating
something similar to this for the lesson plans in my EDU 361 course, although the description
given by the book is somewhat different. It implies that a form of performance-based
assessment can be as simple as giving a problem to a group of students and merely observing
how they go about solving the problem.
Afterword and Appendix 1: I think that my unit relates to decontextualization very well, by
this I mean that I hope to encourage my students to come up with their own definitions of the
concepts we investigate in class through my use of a wide variety of exposure to the concept. I
plan on using imagery, and group activities in the lessons Ive prepared thus far for my unit to
accomplish this.

Appendix 2: I think this appendix relates to my unit in that it shows at what grade levels
students are expected to investigate transformations. It seems that they first learn about
transformations in the sixth grade, they do not interact with transformations in the seventh
grade, and then finally they are taught about dilations in the eighth grade. I find this interesting,
because there is nothing extraordinarily difficult concerning dilations, and it seems to me that if
students were able to learn about the other transformations then they would be prepared to
learn about dilations as well and not have to wait two years to learn about dilations. I think its
silly, and really the only key difference is that dilations tend to not preserve distance and angle
when transforming a shape in this manner. Its definitely something students would be able to
learn about, and it only seems natural to teach them all together rather than years apart.