Day 5: Test Administering

Today I administered the assessment in form of a test. Throughout the unit, we had many formative assessments in the form of posters and drawings and we thought a test assessment would give us a clear picture of what they actually learned. We made a review packet for the students and included several maps they had seen over the unit. This was to give the students more exposure to the material and give them an idea of what the test would look like.
In the beginning of class I allowed them to review the packets for a couple of minutes because it was a Monday. I was very impressed with how the students performed. One student in particular kept saying how he did not know anything, but he only got 2 wrong on the test. He has a bad attitude about learning and working and gets frustrated easily, but he showed he was very capable of learning and working on the test. I was disappointed with the results from one student. She has some attitude problems but achieves quite a lot when she applies herself. I can never tell whether she will be on or off, it changed almost every day. She was absent for part of the lessons so that may have contributed to her lack of knowledge, but she missed 9 questions out of 17.
This brought me to my questions of how to grade. Although I am learning a lot in my instruction and assessment class, I still feel I do not know how to grade a fourth grader's work. I do not want to over burden them with grades, I just want to know where each student is. I talked to my clinical instructor a bit about how she grades tests and she expressed hesitancy in making classes about grades. She uses the 'O/G/S/U' scoring system but stays away from the 'Unsatisfactory' grade because she fears damaging students so young. I agree but I also believe it is important to test to get an understanding of what students do and do not know yet. When grading the tests, I simply marked how many wrong answers and most students fell in the plus one (there was a bonus question) to the -2 range. I was pleased with the number of students here and while math does work out so that 15/17 is quite a low score, I am placing this is the 'good' range. I feel I have an understanding of what students did and did not learn from the lessons and want to show the students that they did learn a lot.
After some serious reflection with the assessments and the lesson plans, I will be able to rethink the unit as a whole and whether my assessment was an accurate measure of what was taught.