I am often asked to assess a students maths levels. There are plenty of tools available to quickly find out a child’s reading or spelling age, also means to check word and phonemic awarenes levels. I have played around with some maths testing over a period of time, but have never been happy with the results.
I would love to hear from others how they go about doing a maths assesment that does not take forever
helen
Well, it’s easy to assess by criteria.
But grade level is a real problem, because most math problems cut across grade levels and the real disaster most often shows up two or three years down the road when it suddenly becoimes clear that a foundation skill is mising. For example I get a number of students in high school having real trouble in algebra and geometry. But 99% of the time it’s *not* the algebra and geometry concepts that are the problem — the problem stated in Grades 5 and 6 with weak teaching of fractions. If you are weak and do 3/4 + 2/3 by some guess-and hope method of magically moving numbers around, you will pass Grade 6 and 7 but bomb on a/b + c/d in algebra. So the student’s “grade level” averages out to 8 on tests, but the weakness goes back to Grade 5 and earlier, often to Grade 2 and 3 and conceptualization of fractions.
To assess by criteria, have the student do a number of problems with you, either explaining out loud as they write, or telling you the steps while you act as a scribe. Try some addition and subtraction, first small whole numbers, then with decimals of same and different number of places, some multiplication and division first of single-digit and then of multi-digit numbers and then decimals, some recognition of fractions from diagrams, drawing of diagrams to represent fractions, calculations with fractions, calculations with mixed numbers, and reading problems and doing multi-step work. In ten minutes you can have a rough idea of the student’s general level and in an hour or two you can pinpoint exactl;y what skills are needed.