Pre-game assessment
To determine where in the game sequence to start a learner, you should find out what that individual learner needs to learn. For this purpose, an interview-style assessment is recommended. “Interview-style assessment” means that you and an individual learner are talking together in a conversation.
To download an assessment you can use, click the “Get a PDF” link below.
Equity in assessment
To achieve equity, instructors must acknowledge the possibility of assumptions based on demographics (race, class, gender, cultural background, English learner status, student age, or other) and must not permit such assumptions to bias assessments or interpretation of assessment data.
To open the assessment in a new tab, click on the link above. You may be able to print the PDF right from your browser. Another way: Click on the download icon at the upper right in your browser. Then go to your Downloads directory, open the downloaded PDF with a free PDF reader (such as Acrobat Reader), and print from there.
What you can tell learners about the assessment
The first page of the PDF includes a script that you can use to get an interview assessment started:
“We’re going to be playing games. They’re going to help you get better at the math you need to learn. I don’t want to waste your time giving you stuff you already know. So I need to find out where your skills are now. To help me find that out, I want to ask you a bunch of questions. We don’t have to do this every time. It’s just because it’s the first day, so I can see where you are now. Is that OK?”
Content of the assessment
The format of the assessment in the PDF is based on an article by Gina Kling and Jennifer Bay-Williams (2014). You ask the learner the questions. After the learner responds, ask “How did you figure it out?”. Learners’ answers to this question are often even more informative than their answers to the mathematics problems.
Recording the answers
It is a good idea to write down the learner’s answers. It takes time to listen to and write down the words of individual learners, but the results can be very illuminating (Ginsburg, 1977, p. 172-174).
If you know in advance what categories of answers you will be looking for, you can save time during the interview by making up a code for each category. Your code allows you to record each answer’s category with just a few letters (Ginsburg, 1998, p. 64; Kling and Bay-Williams, 2014) or by circling the code (Newton, 2016, p. 43-45).
Using your own form
You might want to create your own assessment form. You can decide what to put on it based on your knowledge of the typical needs of the learners you work with. For example, if you are teaching second grade, you would want to give your learners a wider variety of addition problems than you would if you were teaching kindergarten. And your second graders’ needs might be different from the needs of second graders in a different curriculum, or even in a different classroom.
Creating an interview assessment form is quick and easy to do in any spreadsheet program. Just make sure that your form covers the content that is needed for your learners.
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References
Ginsburg, Herbert P. 1977. Children’s Arithmetic: The Learning Process. Oxford: D. Van Nostrand.
Ginsburg, Herbert P., Susan F. Jacobs, and Luz Stella Lopez. 1998. The Teacher’s Guide to Flexible Interviewing in the Classroom: Learning What Children Know About Math. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Kling, Gina, and Jennifer M. Bay-Williams. 2014. “Assessing Basic Fact Fluency.” Teaching Children Mathematics 20(8): 489-497.
Newton, Nicki. 2016. Math Running Records in Action: A Framework for Assessing Basic Fact Fluency in Grades K-5. New York, NY: Routledge.
August 17, 2020; last updated May 19, 2021