Alternative Assessments are Awesome!

Alternative assessments are a wonderful tool to use to assess student understanding. Traditional methods call to mind pencil and paper, independent work, a grade from the teacher, and limited to no reflection. However, alternative assessments center on teacher-designed assessments that share insight into the content and way in which students are learning, assess a wider range of skills, and allow students to play a more active role in the learning and assessment process. These key traits of alternative methods provide students with opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned through unique and authentic avenues; offer teachers insight into student learning so that teachers can modify instruction if needed; provide ways to measure content area, critical thinking, and problem solving; and involve students in the monitoring of their learning. Alternative assessments include, but are not limited to, discussions, projects, experiments, reflection, peer review, and portfolios.

Alternative assessments promote and assess life skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. Students are encouraged to go beyond the surface understanding and make deeper and stronger connections. Through assessments, such as rubrics, students acquire and practice learning skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. Using digital portfolios to assess student understanding allows students to focus on creativity, collaboration, and information and technology literacy. These 21st century skills, as well as others, are important for students as they become better problem solvers and decision makers and can be encouraged and evaluated through alternative assessments.

This trimester in Grade 5, students have been assessed by taking tests as well as completing projects in math class. In March, students took part in a Pi Day project to discover the value of pi using circles, rulers, pipe cleaners, and the formula for the circumference. This project helped students practice their collaboration skills as they worked together to precisely measure the circumference and diameter of circles. Then they used their understanding of dividing decimals to calculate the circumference divided by the diameter getting extremely close to the value of pi.

In April, students received a volume project choice board. Students selected one of six projects - poster, scavenger hunt, instructional video, mobile, sculpture, or board game - to demonstrate their understanding of volume. This allowed students to have a choice in how they conveyed their knowledge, as well as be creative. Sculptures and mobiles made of rectangular prisms and cubes decorated the classroom, eliciting many curious questions. Instructional videos and posters in which students explained the process of finding volume, then showed their skills with examples, will be saved to help explain the concept to next year’s Grade 5 students.

In May, Grade 5 students will be learning about polygons. During this unit, students will learn about cubism and create an image in the cubist style. Each student will be responsible for using traditional art materials to recreate an image. They will classify the triangles and polygons using color.

Sample project from Math in Focus book