Case Study 1.1

Assessing Students: A Case Study

Assessing Students Casey plans to assess all the students in his Algebra 1 classes with a pretest at the beginning of the semester. This will help him to better understand students' specific needs.

Casey: General Education Math Teacher

Casey's Background Casey has been teaching Algebra 1 for the past seven years. During those years, Casey has seen students come in with a wide variety of needs for support based on prior knowledge weaknesses. He is familiar with many of the common mistakes that students make.

Assessing Students Shera has already read through her students' IEPs and understands the goals. She is interested getting to know her students more and have a better sense of their generalized math support needs; she plans to use this to inform her instruction.

Shera: Special Education Teacher

Background Shera has been teaching special education for 10 years. Recently she shifted from a middle school to a high school teaching position. She is excited to work with her students' general education teachers to support her students.

Casey Casey created an algebra test based on knowledge and skills they should already have from past math courses. These are the firm foundation they need to access the algebra curriculum. He focused this assessment on key math topics that he's had to reteach in past years. He asked Shera to look over the test and offer suggestions.

Shera Shera suggested that the pretest contain a range of problems for each topic.This will give them insights into both what students do and don't know. Her students will have their typical accommodations during the test so they are mimicking real test conditions in the pretest.

Writing the Pretest

Pretest Results

Shera and Casey reviewing the results of the test together. As Casey predicted, there were common topics that many students had difficulty with, such as:

• determining the value of a variable when exponents or division were included
• translating between fractions, decimals, and percentages

As Shera and Casey organized students by areas of weakness, they discovered that students with and without IEPs were present in all of the groups. In other words, some students on IEPs had widespread needs, while others had specific areas of weakness in math. The same was true for the general education students.

What to do next? Casey and Shera want to maximize their impact through their collaboration. What do you think their next steps should be? Refer to the Reflection Box below to record your ideas related to this case study.

What next?

Both Shera and Casey want their students to be successful in Algebra 1. Each have specific responsibilities to groups of students but are willing to be flexible as they design instruction and support for their students.