Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Forms of Assessment Prompt 2
My learning goal is for first grade students to become familiar enough with addition and subtraction facts up to 10 that they do not need to count on their fingers to get the right answer. I would use the information processing theory to teach these facts because once the information is encoded into their long term memory, they will easily be able to retrieve the information. However, this will take time because it requires a lot of rehearsing and connecting their prior knowledge of numbers to the new information they are learning. As an assessment, I would do give students addition and subtraction worksheets that they each complete in 2 minutes. I would make sure to walk around to see they are not using their fingers or number lines as help because at this point, students should be able to have their facts memorized. Something that I will make sure that kids know is that 2+3=5 is that same thing as 3+2=5 and also if they just take the answer which is the larger number 5 and subtract one of the smaller numbers, they will get the number left over. This is shown as 5-2=3 and 5-3=2. If they can rehearse this information through encoding, mnemonics, and categorization, they should be able to have this information stored into their long term memory, which will eventually have easy retrieval during these timed tests.
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This is a really good example and I really like how you added the 2+3=5 the same as 3+2=5. I feel like a lot of the younger students do tend to believe its different and that things may not equal, so it's great that you added those in here. Encoding is obviously a great tool to use in the classroom but I'm not quite sure how mnemonics would play into this kind of situation. Unless it's maybe remember multiplation facts but I'm not sure if that even works. By using things such as "6 and 8 went on a date and came back as 48" could be consider that a mnemonic?
ReplyDeleteFirst, why did you choose the IP theory as the best for this learning goal? I think it could make sense, given your emphasis on retrieval of information, but this also sounds great for teaching internalization of the information (in a Vygotskian sense).
ReplyDeleteNote that the instruction should teach them how to encode (meaningfully connect to information in long term memory), and that rehearsal will only hold information temporarily in working memory.
I'm wondering how you see the assessment you decribed as aligned with both IP theory and your learning goal. I can see some connections but they're not explicitly layed out here. You time the test, indicating that speed is important for retrieval (is it, according to IP theory?)
You are not allowing them to use their fingers to count--but make sure you also instruct in the same way!
One thing you're missing here, that I think would make this a great assessment, and well aligned with your theory, would be to make sure to ask teh questions in a way that cues information stored in long term memory to aid retrieval. There are certain techniques you can use to aid retrieval (even if information is in LTM, it may not be retrieved without the right question). If you taught them to encode by asking them to visualize familiar scenes or objects (apples, etc), then your test questions should also ask them things like "If you put 2 apples into a bin, and add 3 more, how many are in the bin?" Do you understand how this would aid retrieval, if you taught in the way you describe? (And how it would align the assessment with IP theory?)