Place Value to 100

Strand: Number
Outcomes: 5, 6, 7

Step 4: Assess Student Learning

Guiding Questions

Look back at what you determined as acceptable evidence in Step 2.
What are the most appropriate methods and activities for assessing student learning?
How will I align my assessment strategies with my teaching strategies?

Sample Assessment Tasks

In addition to ongoing assessment throughout the lessons, consider the following sample activities to evaluate students' learning at key milestones. Suggestions are given for assessing all students as a class or in groups, individual students in need of further evaluation and individual or groups of students in a variety of contexts.

A. Whole Class/Group Assessment

Examples of Whole Class/Group Assessment Word Document

B. One-on-One Assessment

One of the easiest ways to spot students having difficulty recognizing the relationship between the position of a digit and its place value is playing a dice game where students make the largest number from the digits shown on the die. Students who do not make the largest (or smallest, as directed) number reliably from the two dice tossed can be seen to need additional work before developing this concept. If a student has not performed satisfactorily on the first performance assessment above, a game with the teacher will show you if the student does know that the position of the digit influences its value or not. If the student reliably selects the larger number to be the tens digit when asked to make the largest number and the smaller number when asked to make the smallest number, you know the student understands the concept. What the student may be lacking is:

understanding of the performance task
concentration and stamina to complete the task
language and organization necessary to describe his or her thinking
fine motor skills to print the length of communication required
experiences with manipulatives as a basis for the diagrams or
health, energy and desire to perform the task on that particular occasion.

Based upon your knowledge of the student, you may be able to diagnosis which of these is most likely and remediate accordingly. If you think the student has fine motor issues, try asking the student to do a similar problem with the base ten materials in the room while explaining his or her thinking verbally.

There are additional structured interviews in the Alberta Diagnostic Mathematics Program, Division I book Numeration that may be helpful for students who do not seem ready for the Grade 2 curriculum.

C. Applied Learning

When students are counting over 20 items, provide opportunities for them to group the items into sets of ten and organize their counts and comparisons accordingly.

For example, if students have been asked to estimate the number of buttons in a jar, when it comes time to find the winner, allow students to count the buttons by making groups of ten in portion cups and then count by tens before adding the ones leftover.
In this way, several students can count tens and several others can check their counts.
The whole class can finalize the check of the final number by counting the tens and then adding the ones.
The students can explain how to write the numeral for this amount based upon the tens and ones counts.
Have the students measure their heights using base ten rods and centicubes to encourage them to count tens and then ones.
Counting pennies to find the total value is another job students can do both at home and at school.
If there is a school penny drive or other collection in which there are many pennies collected, the students can count groups of ten into small portion cups until they have ten groups of ten and transfer these into a larger portion cup to be counted as a dollar.
On occasion, items such as brochures or poppies arrive in the office and need to be divided into classroom quantities.
Ask the office if your Grade 2 students can be the accountants.
Have various teams make piles of tens and then the necessary ones to make each class’s pile.
Have the teams rotate so a second team of Grade 2 accountants audits their counting.

Related Resources

Assessment in the Mathematics