Happy Spooky Season!

We took a break and now we're back to take you through Utah State Board of Education’s 2023 "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" with the aid of Derivita’s SpotCheck one step at a time. 

Hopefully, armed with both this toolkit and SpotCheck you can create, manage, and deploy formative assessments quickly and easily in your math classroom on a daily basis!

Download the USBE "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" here:

Check back on Derivita's Blog Tuesdays to see the latest blog post on how to best utilize SpotCheck to support your instructional practices and the creation of digital formative assessments in your daily math classroom. 

Step 3: Eliciting and analyzing evidence of student thinking 

SpotCheck, especially with its recent facelift (if you know, you know), is a perfect tool to support this step in the Formative Assessment development process outlined by USBE. 

In this section of the toolkit, “hands-on activities, performance tasks, entrance and exit tickets, white boards/clickers, and/or large and small group work” are specifically mentioned as varied ways of eliciting student thought processes, identifying weaknesses and strengths, and empowering teachers to make thoughtful instructional choices in the classroom. 

Creating, deploying, and then analyzing these types of tasks can be streamlined with SpotCheck. 

Replace Clickers and Whiteboards

Instead of using clickers or white boards, have your students pull out the phones (they’ll be overjoyed) and have them scan the SpotCheck QR code and instantly access an individual question or set of questions that align with your learning objectives. Your students can instantly plug in their responses and in real-time you can see their solutions or non-responses populate, delete inappropriate answers, and then immediately identify which students require more instruction on a concept and which students are ready to move on. 

Added Bonus: You and your students don’t need to purchase additional materials for their every-day instruction. You and your students get to use a personal device that is already used every single day.

The Easiest Entrance/ Exit Tickets

No need to factor in developing the real-time assessments in your lesson-planning. You can create these “tickets” on the fly right before class or even in class. You can select any existing question from a previous course, assignment, quiz, or exam. You can also choose a question from the Derivita Math Item Bank or create your own question in minutes within the Assignment Assembly. However you go about it, you can see where your students are at with your math content at your convenience. 

Added Bonus: You can create open-response, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and more! Various question types allow for a deeper understanding of how much content your students have mastered and how they are digesting new material. 

Creating Tasks for Large/ Small Group Work

SpotCheck makes it easy to create group work for your students. Here is an easy 10-step process to create groups or partnerships with SpotCheck:

1. Throw a math question up on the board with SpotCheck.
2. Have your students bring out their phones and snap the QR code.
3. Ask your students to work on the SpotCheck problem individually. This can be timed.
4. Through SpotCheck, see who put in the same answer, who got the correct answer, and who didn’t respond.
5. Now you can pair or group students based on their responses. You can put students who got the correct answer with students who didn’t respond. Or you can put together students who got wrong answers, but each of them arrived at a different number or solution.
6. Ask the new groups or partnerships to discuss how they arrived at their solution. This can be timed.
7. Throw another similar question covering the same concept on the board with SpotCheck.
8. Allow students to work together to come up with the new solution to the new problem. This can be timed.
9. After putting the correct solution on the board and displaying your students' responses, ask them to discuss why and how they arrived at their own solution.
10. Show the entire class how to work out the solution step-by-step.
    
    

How do you elicit student engagement and analyze student thought in your classroom?

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