No Worksheet Required for Assessment

  • Posted by:Ann Baker

Earlier in the year we created a blog about place value and some schools have run the assessment activity across the whole school.

At Salisbury Park Primary School, the teachers carried out the assessment task in February and planned a focused teaching sequence based on their findings. They repeated the task with new numbers as a post intervention assessment.

On Monday this week, at their student free day, the teachers brought both sets of work samples and set them out on the library floor. The samples snaked around library, going from Reception through all grades to Grade 7.

There was a richness to the discussions and comparisons that the teachers were making both between the pre- and post-assessments from their own classes as well as in the comparisons and growth points between classes.

At all levels, the teachers could see stepping up in terms of:

  • trusting the count, only a few students had marked each item as they drew it or had repeated the count from the beginning several times (counting all each time)
  • organizing their diagrams either in subitizable groups or easy to spot countable units (equal sized groups of 2s, 5s or 10s)
  • using 1 object to represent a given number, in essence using a scale. Quantities using this technique were quick to create and to interpret:

The range of numbers used for the task had been modified to differentiate the task for the range of students involved.

Conversations led to what has worked during the intervention, including …

  • The emphasis on counting, counting on and back from any starting number had had a huge impact across the board.
  • Counting large collections and unitizing (making equal sized groups) and emphasis on drawing diagrams rather than randomly placed objects had played a major role too.
  • Students were beginning to describe their work using place value structures and multiplicative thinking, “12 tens is 120, so I did 12 rows of 10.”
  • Work on reading and writing numerals correctly beyond 100 is an ongoing task for some students but they have been targeted and intentional interventions will be set in place.

What can I say?

“Amazing and professional job Salisbury Park Primary School!”

Want more Place Value help? Check out Place Value for the IWB, Place Value to 100 and Beyond and Place Value to 1,000,000.

 and PLACE VALUE to 1,000,000.