Throwback Thursday: Breaking Down Quizzes

Last week, I linked up with Cara at First Grade Parade for a Throwback Thursday post.   I really enjoyed looking through my old posts on the blog...so much so that I thought I would do it again!  The post I am about to re-introduce to you is something that I use weekly in my classroom to help me form small groups, see what/who needs remediation, and to generally guide my teaching......my weekly Quiz Breakdown Form.

This originally appeared on my blog in January of 2012...right when I started :)

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I, like any teacher, know that I am supposed to give assessments to my students in order to find out just where they stand in my classroom.  I create a quiz (or use one that is created for me), the students get a score, and then I know if they are getting it or not.  Right?

Well, it just wasn't working that way for me.  I knew Johnny got 5 out of 10 wrong, but I didn't know what that meant.  Did he get all of the addition questions right and bomb the subtraction?  Was Johnny doing great with antonyms but lacking in homophones?  Entering a number in my grade book wasn't telling me these things.  In fact, all it told me was what percentage of the quiz Johnny got right, not how to help him learn those things he missed (which, isn't that the point of the quiz anyway?  To figure out what the students know or don't know and to help guide my instruction?)

So I developed this little Quiz Breakdown for me to use that would tell me what standards the kids knew, where they were lacking, where I should pull small groups, and what skills just needed to be taught whole class.  Looking at this I can, in one quick glance, assess my class as a whole and decide what direction to take my next lessons in.

Here is how it works.  When the quizzes are corrected, I go one by one and input the information on the chart.  When a student gets a question wrong (say #1), I put a tally by the number 1.  I then write the #1 by that student's classroom number.  I do this for all 30 students (it takes all of 10 minutes to do)  

Once the data is in, I then know who needs remediation on certain skills, what standards I need to review whole class, and what standards the kids have basically mastered.  You can see from this close up of the chart, that I need to make sure to do another whole class lesson on recognizing various angles (this was the first week doing that).  20 of my 30 students missed the two questions dealing with that standard.  Prime factorization, on the other hand, seems to have sunk in, as only one child missed that question.

The final step is to create my remediation groups.  I write the standard/skill for the group, then look for all of the children who missed that skill.  You can see in this picture, Student #7 missed the question about ordering decimals (along with 3 other children).  I have chosen to make that a focus of one of my small group remediation lessons so I put #7 under my first group.

Since most of my students did fairly well on this quiz (whoo hooo!) I don't need to pull a second ordering decimals group.  That is why there are no names there.

I keep these all year long.  Every other quiz or so, I look back and them to see if there are any patterns, growth, etc...  They really help me to get a better grasp on what my students are learning and help to guide my instruction.

Here is where you can access the form for FREE. I have one for math/science and one for Lang Arts (as there are more questions in LA than math, on my assessments)  Feel free to use whichever fits your needs.