Report Cards

Report cards are sent home twice each school year:

• Feb 3, 2020
  
• Jun. 26, 2020

As we begin the month of February with report cards, we are again reminded of the essential partnership between parents and teachers, home and school.  There is much written about report cards and we wanted to take this opportunity to clarify our definition of assessment as well as the various forms of assessment and the standard for student assessment.

The CBE states:  Assessing student learning is an ongoing cycle of gathering, interpreting, and responding to student work. Assessment is used to inform the next steps in learning and evaluate student knowledge and understanding in relationship to the learner outcomes.  Daily, ongoing assessment and report cards are not separate. They inform each other. Both are based on outcomes and Front Matter from the Programs of Study and inform next steps for learners and teachers. Formative assessment supports learning, summative assessment verifies learning, grading and reports cards summarize learning.

More detailed descriptions include:

• Formative assessment is the feedback students receive on how they are doing and how they might improve.  This is ongoing feedback which occurs througday to day work in the classroom. 
• Summative assessment is a comparison, at a particular moment in time between individual student achievement and the outcomes of the Programs of studies.  Multiple assessments are used to evaluate student achievement against the CBE report card outcomes.

Now that families have had an opportunity to review the report card (summative assessment) we hope you will notice:

• the strong connections between the information included and the work samples that were shared in the November interview you had with your child’s teacher
• the links between the tasks described in the classroom blogs, the Tweets and the report card stems.  Each Edgemont classroom has a blog/tweets which can be accessed on our home page.  Teachers and students take great care to communicate their work in a variety of ways.  We strongly encourage parents to read the tweets with your children so that they have an opportunity to share their personal connections to the learning.
• the continuing opportunities you have to support your child in taking up the best next steps (goals) for learning in the months ahead. 

We will look forward to meeting with you at our next Student Learning Conferences on September 19, and November 21, 2019, and March 19, 2020 where we will again share our observations, student work samples and where your children will also talk about themselves as learners and share their goals and strategies.

Parents sometimes ask how their particular children “rank” against the other children in the classroom.  We would remind parents that in Alberta, we assess student learning based upon the student’s ability to achieve the outcomes and Front Matter from the Programs of Study.  The report card indicator scale provides a description of the degree to which each child is achieving those outcomes.  The following chart provides a fuller description of what teachers are looking for when measuring achievement:

CBE Indicator Scale K-9

Please see our Edgemont Assessment Plan below for a timeline and components of assessment at our particular school.  If you are interested in exploring more information about assessment, we would recommend the Assessment and Reporting section of the CBE website which can be found at:  http://www.cbe.ab.ca/programs/curriculum/assessment-and-reporting/Pages/default.aspx

We also welcome your questions and invite you to talk with your children about the assessment processes they are engaged in during their lessons and inquiry studies at school.  We appreciate your support as we work to ensure that each child is making gains each day.

2019-2020 Edgemont Assessment Plan