Cinderella’s Sand-castle

While assessment can occur just for the sake of assessment, students can better demonstrate their learning within a real world context. My sandcastle assessment was developed for my 7th grade virtual math students. This assessment is focused on a real world engaging context that allows students to apply their learning in a genuine way.

For this assessment students are asked to act like a travel agent to create an itinerary for

a client. Ideally I would have given this to students after ratios, proportions, and a basic intro into percents. Due to some scheduling pieces and this activity spanning a 3 week time span, I will actually give this project to students. The focus of this assessment is on percent increase and decrease which includes tax, tip, and discounts. These skills lead themselves well to a real world example as almost every purchase involves these applications of percents. Overall this project will be focused on the objective: I can plan and create a trip guide in order to plan a Disney trip through the application of percents and evaluate my trip to ensure it meets the wants and needs of my client.

While I was using this assessment I incorporated the use of an AI chat bot, Chat GPT, to help bring my idea to life. While the initial ideas were original I was able to create a project that was more relevant to my learners. AI chat bots “can be used to generate quizzes and assessments tailored to individual students’ needs, allowing for more personalized learning” (Smith 2023). While I would have eventually been able to create an assessment like this without that tool, the use of AI was useful to clarify expectations, a rubric, and create supplemental practice opportunities to enhance the real world nature for students. 

Throughout this project, students will use a combination of Canva, Google Slides, and Kami as their technology. On their itinerary students need to apply fraction skills to set a schedule, menu, and travel tips while staying within the constraints given to them by a “client” they interviewed.  This assessment is designed to be an individual project due to the constraints with virtual teaching. While facing the constraints of teaching virtually it is essential to  “repeatedly revisit course elements to ensure they support our overarching goal of creating an engaging and inclusive online course”.  

While this is a summative assessment I plan to support it through formative pieces such as breaking the assessment into smaller components where students can receive narrative feedback. I also plan on weaving in other activities such as exit tickets to collect formative data along the way of this project. My design of this assessment focuses on creating a project or activity to guide the demonstration of mastery. I am choosing to only grade the final product based on a rubric because  “the more students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to be with what they’re doing” (Kohn, 2011).

 After completion of this project students will self evaluate using a rubric as well as receive narrative feedback and a grade using the rubric. While ultimately this is a summative assessment students will have the opportunity to improve their work by applying narrative feedback throughout. I plan to grade the checkpoints as pass/fail checks instead of graded pieces to help students focus on the learning for the sake of learning. I plan to use the data collected through this process. I plan to inform my instruction through identifying areas that are in need of reinforcement which will be applied to choose supplemental activities. In addition to the self and teacher feedback I also hope to have students clients provide authentic feedback to students in order to solidify the real world application. 

While there are many ways to assess students I feel the real world context of this project provides an authentic learning opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge. This project includes an element of choice while holding students to high standards to demonstrate their mastery. As students plan their adventure to Cinderella’s (Sand)Castle, they are also challenged to show their mastery in an engaging but rigorous way.

Flower Darby. (2021, January 11). Planning a great online class through roundabout design. Faculty Focus.

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Smith, G. (2023, March 23). Transform assessment with AI and GPT: A positive approach for teachers. This is Graeme. https://thisisgraeme.me/2023/03/20/assessment-with-ai-and-gpt/