In “After One Number Is the Next!” first-year teacher Maureen McCarty
draws on her preservice education, professional articles, and her own in-
sights to develop an assessment interview for a student of concern. She dis-
covers that spending the time and effort to conduct a relatively brief inter-
view can yield valuable information in helping her understand what this
child needs to learn.
In “Assessing and Developing Early Number Concepts,” second-grade
teacher Anne Marie O’Reilly marvels at how much she learned by review-
ing the development of counting and beginning number sense ideas from
kindergarten to grade 2. She then explains how she uses that information to
assess and plan a consistent course of action, as opposed to a series of unre-
lated accommodations, for one of her struggling students.
In “How Many Children Got off the Bus?” Ana Vaisenstein works with a
small group of fourth graders on a subtraction word problem. She asks them
to solve the problem independently so she can assess their knowledge of sub-
traction. Ana’s goal is to help the students recognize a subtraction situation
and find an entry point (a model, representation, or drawing) to help them
solve the problem.
In “Get to 100,” Michael Flynn introduces the game Get to 100 (Russell
et al. 2008g) to his second-grade class and then works with two students as
they play a variation of the game that he adapted to meet their needs. When
he observes that they are having difficulty, he poses questions and makes
additional accommodations to facilitate their understanding.
One of the clear messages of all of these stories is that there are no easy answers,
no shortcuts to understanding and planning for students’ growing mathemati-
cal understanding. However, knowing the content well enables these teachers
to have many strategies at their disposal for listening to children’s thinking,
analyzing their work, and planning appropriate accommodations.
Questions to Think About
What are some assessment strategies that the teachers use?
What did the teachers learn from their assessments?
What evidence is there that the assessment informed their planning and
teaching?
How did the assessment process benefit the student or students in each episode?
Linking Assessment and Teaching