Assessing notebooks for primary grades

Assessment is an important part of the learning process. In order to determine students' understanding, design future lessons,  and grade individual performance, teachers need to assess students thought-process frequently. This can be challenging in the primary grades when reading and writing skills are still developing. When designing notebook activities for Kindergarten students, for example, assessment involves interpreting each student's reasoning to capture his or her development over the school year.

Teachers must consider how to plan notebook activities so that students' reasoning process is built-in to the work that is demonstrated on the page. How will students demonstrate their thought process? Will students use best guess spelling or pat answers provided by the teacher? Will the teacher circulate and pencil in students' responses as a record for later evaluation? These are important things to consider when planning out your notebooks because the reasoning process is the best way to show growth. How will you capture student explanations in the notebook?

Some thoughts about documenting students' work are to: 1.) meet with students in small groups and review the activities together, making notes on individual pages as you listen to each students' reasoning, 2.) meet one-on-one with each student weekly and document their reasoning i thier notebook as part of your conference, 3.) circulate the classroom as the activity is being completed, writing the comments students make about their reasoning at the bottom of the notebook page. 4.) keep a separate record in the form of a chart or rubric that can travel around the room with you, allowing you to document comments in that way.

The main thing to consider is that you want an efficient way to demonstrate students' progress that will make grading, future lesson planning, and teacher-parent conferences  hassle-free and efficient. Keep in mind that the assessment process should be valuable to all who access the results, including the student, the parents, and the teacher. Because Kindergarten students cannot usually write out their responses in words, teachers must find the most valuable, least time-consuming way to track students' verbal explanations of their work. This is no easy task, but will save lots of time and headache later if a plan is built into the notebook concept from day one.