Assessment & Reporting
As of February 24th, parents and guardians have been able to log into MyCBE to see their child’s report card. What you are seeing not only represents your child’s academic growth and progress throughout the first half of the school year, but also months of work by your child’s teacher. What exactly are you seeing? Does it all make sense? Here is a summary of the process behind each child’s report card.
Step # 1 - Instructional Design
Your child’s teacher studies the curriculum they are required to teach at their particular grade level. There is a separate one for each subject. They design instructional experiences that will ensure your child meets the multiple learner outcomes that are part of that curriculum. These instructional designs also include assessments and are modified for the different learning needs within your child’s classroom.
Step # 2 - Formative and Summative Assessments
How can students demonstrate their understanding of a learner outcome? This question gets answered by teachers when they include multiple means of assessment into their instructional design.
Formative Assessment is a means of “checking as you go” while the students are engaged in their learning. This happens daily in the form of checklists, conversations, class discussions, pictures, observations, plus many more. How the students are doing along the way provides the teacher with information necessary to make instructional adjustments as they work through the learning activities.
Summative Assessments occur at the end of a topic or unit and often take the form of a quiz, assignment, project, presentation or test, but can also be a conversation. These will include most or all of the learner outcomes that were covered in that section of the curriculum.
Step # 3 - Body of Evidence
How does a teacher decide if a student achieves a 1, 2, 3 or 4 on a report card stem? Throughout the report period from September to January, teachers collect evidence of a child’s learning in each subject. This evidence gets examined in December and January to see if, and to what degree, each student has met the learner outcomes that were taught during this time. While much of the summative assessment evidence is consistent between students, the formative assessment evidence can vary greatly depending on a student's learner profile. Students have different ways of demonstrating their understanding, so the bodies of evidence used to assess their learning can vary greatly.
Step # 4 - Reporting
Teachers share the assessment decisions they have made by reviewing the bodies of evidence collected for each student. These are reported by highlighting specific areas of success and specific areas for growth looking forward.
The reporting process takes several weeks of work over and above the regular day to day demands experienced by our teaching staff. It is a very important step in the learning cycles of each of our students and often helps to ensure the teacher, students and parent / guardian are moving forward together.
It is important for parents / guardians to remember that the learner outcomes have been created to reflect the student’s achievement by the end of that grade level. Since we are only at the halfway mark of the school year, it is reasonable for many students not to have met that grade level expectation yet. In most cases, student achievement will increase as the school year progresses.
Literacy Night - Thursday, March 5th
Get all of the answers by attending our Literacy Night on Thursday, March 5th at 6:30. Find out more about the different parts of reading, learn some games, connect with other families, and yes, even win some prizes!
Pink Shirt Day Assembly
Big thank you to our Grade 1 Team for putting together a wonderful Pink Shirt Day Assembly on Wednesday. Our students did a great job of leading us through songs and stories that reminded us how important it is to be kind every day. Thank you also to Ms. MacDonald for sharing her talents and to all of the family members who came to see and support our young performers.
Book Fair - Week of March 16th
Our annual Scholastic Book Fair will be hosted in our Learning Commons the week of March 16th. Monday and Tuesday will be scheduled for classes and students to come through for some “previewing”. Sales will start the following day with a schedule for the week that looks like this:
Wednesday ………. 9:30 - 3:30
Thursday …………… 9:30 - 3:30, 4:45 - 7:45
Friday ………………… 8:00 - 1:00
All proceeds from the book fair are kept here at school and go directly to supporting our Learning Commons. Each year this event adds several thousands of dollars' worth of books that our students can access all year long.
Have a great week!