Miriam LarsonAssessment Assignment

Assignment Description:

Scenario: You are teaching a unit to fourth graders on locating nonfictionbooks in the Dewey section of your library. You meet with the students once aweek for thirty minutes and the unit will last 4 weeks. The first week youintroduce the Dewey Decimal System with a fun video illustrating how thenonfiction books are divided and classified. The second week you present aPowerPoint slide show that goes into detail describing each of the ten Deweycategories. Week 3 is a Dewey Bingo game where students have a Bingo cardfilled with Dewey numbers. You hold up a nonfiction book and read the title.Students must decide which Dewey category it falls into and cover that numberon the card. Week 4 is an activity in which pairs of students are given a Deweynumber and instructed to locate a book with the same number.

Step 2: Type the title of the activity and book it goeswith at the top of the document you are preparing.Step 3: Select an assessment method from the book Assessingfor Learning that will apply to the activity you have selected.Step 4: Design an assessment tool to use with your selectedactivity. (Actually create it to hand in as part of the assignment.)Step 5: Provide an explanation/justification for themethod you have selected and exactly how/when it will be used.

Assessment Documents:

Dewey Decimal Unit: Week 2 Instructions

Today we will learn more in depth about the Dewey Decimal system by listening to a presentation. During the presentation:

1. Listen and take brief notes to help you remember something about each of the ten Dewey categories and why we use the Dewey system. 2. Keep an ear out for Dewey sections that might contain books related to your interests (hobbies, favorite school subject, etc.). Make a note of which Dewey category they are in.

3. Pay close attention so you are ready to play Dewey Bingo next week!

Rationale for Exit Pass:

Harada and Yoshina suggest using the exit pass in lessons where students are presented with a lot of information that might be overwhelming. While this unit focuses on a fairly specific concept, I think the second week’s presentation may seem overwhelming to students. They will be presented with ten different categories that represent millions of subjects that are each associated with a number. In this case, the exit pass allows the teacher to help students make a personal connection to the Dewey system and synthesize some of what they heard during the presentation.

The exit pass I designed attempts to mirror the goals of the lesson. Although I did not write this unit, I have outlined goals that I associate with the second lesson as follows:

Lesson Goals: Students will . . .

Place topics that interest them within one of the broad Dewey categories Practice active listening and careful note-taking. Understand that catalogers create numbers for books that fit within the Dewey

system.

Dewey Decimal Unit: Exit Pass (Week 2)

Name ______________________________________ Date________________

If I had a whole library filled with books on one subject they would all have a Dewey number in the ____ (example: 700s) and be about _________ (example: art).

One thing I learned about the Dewey Decimal system today was ______________________________________________________________________________________________.

One question that I have about the Dewey Decimal system is ________________________________________________________________________________________________.

Computer technology books start with the number 004. Pretend you invented a new technology and then had to catalog (assign a number to) the book you wrote about it.

My technology would be called

_____________________________ (example: Nanorg).

The number for my book would be:

0 0 4 . ___________.

The activity explanation helps set students up with the expectation that they will have to use the knowledge presented in the next lesson (bingo!). It also sets them up to make a personal connection to the Dewey system and helps motivate them to understand the goals of the lesson.

The exit pass questions mirror the learning goals in order to help students affirm the knowledge they have gained and utilize their notes. This is the process that Harada and Yoshino recommend for creating exit pass questions. The first question asks them to place one of their personal interests in a Dewey category in a creative way: If I had a whole library filled with books on one subject . . . The second two questions encourage students to utilize their notes to highlight information and share something that is still unclear to them; they are asked to write one thing they learned and one thing they still have a question about. The last question asks the student to take the role of cataloguer; pretend you invented a new technology and then had to catalog (assign a number to) the book you wrote about it.. This simply asks them to invent a number but the intention is to make the cataloguing process more accessible and allow the students to take ownership over the system.

Challenges: Because this is a very concrete lesson, I found it difficult to make an exit pass that was not like a test. I think the intention of the exit pass is to allow students to synthesize what they learned on their own terms. It helps the teacher understand what stood out for students in the lesson. It should be brief and very simple. I struggled to phrase questions in the “students’ language,” as Harada and Yoshina encourage in their book. My solution was to make the exit pass more of a creative exercise than the models provided by Harada and Yoshina. I am hopeful that fourth graders will enjoy a little bit of silliness.