How to Successfully Teach Eureka Math: Using Assessments and the Grading Rubric

Now that you understand how to best teach the Eureka math lessons, there is one more component we need to dive into - assessments!

The Eureka assessments look different from traditional math assessments, and are graded differently as well.

​Let’s take a look at these assessments, and how to use the grading rubric.

Most modules include 2 assessments - a mid-module assessment and an end-of-module assessment. 

The mid-module assessment is typically given about halfway through the module and covers all the concepts discussed for the module up to that point. The end-of-module assessment is given after all lessons in the module have been taught, and includes concepts from the entire module (not just the second half).

The problems on the assessments are similar to those found on the problem sets and exit tickets. They include a mix of concrete and abstract problems. There are several parts to each problem.

For example, take a look at an excerpt from the 2nd grade module 1 assessment:

On this page, there are 2 problems. Problem 1 has 6 parts (a-f) and problem 2 has 2 parts (a and b). Each part in a particular problem covers the same topic, but may get increasingly more difficult, moving from concrete to abstract.

As with the other aspects of Eureka, assessments can be modified if you wish to leave out certain parts (although it is highly recommended that you leave at least one part of each problem in order to assess a variety of skills). 
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There are typically not many problems on assessments. In most cases, there are only 4 or 5 main problems - though they often have multiple parts. However, because of this, the assessments themselves aren’t very long. Oftentimes, they only have a total of around 15-20 questions. This results in a very high number of points per question if you were to use a grading scale of 0-100 with each question worth the same value.

Because Eureka assessments are supposed to help determine mastery of a skill, a rubric is provided for use in grading the assessments. The assessments take into consideration HOW a student solved the problem - not just whether or not they arrived at the correct answer. It is incredibly important that you use the rubric. The Eureka tests are designed to be used with the rubric, and grading them any other way will result in grades that do not accurately reflect the students’ abilities.

How to Use the Grading Rubric

A grading rubric for each assessment is provided just following the assessment in your teacher’s manual. Each problem is to be rated on a scale of 1-4 based on how well the student performed on ALL the parts for that problem. The point system is as follows:

• 1 point: student displays little evidence of reasoning without a correct answer
  
• 2 points: student displays some evidence of reasoning without a correct answer
  
• 3 points: student displays evidence of some reasoning with a correct answer, or evidence of a solid reasoning with an incorrect answer
  
• 4 points: student displays evidence of solid reasoning with a correct answer
  

Points are assigned per problem, not part. So, if an assessment has a total of 4 problems, the max number of points a student can receive would be 16.

While grading, you first want to go through and check their answers, marking any that are wrong. Once you have done that, pull out the rubric and use the guide to help you determine the number of points to give for each problem.

The rubric includes detailed suggestions for how to determine the points to assign for each problem. Here is a sample of the rubric for the portion of the assessment shown above (grade 2 module 1):

You can see that for each problem, it gives recommendations for determining the number of points the student should receive. Of course, these are suggestions, and you can use your own best judgement as the teacher. This is simply there as a guide to help you. If you choose to modify the assessment and leave out certain parts or problems, of course you will need to modify the rubric as well to accommodate that.

Once you have finished assigning points, add up the total number of points received for each student. In order to translate this into a percentage grade, you will need to use a rubric score converter such as roobrix.com.

On roobrix.com, adjust the settings to match your criteria. For example, on a test with 5 problems, each rated on a scale of 1-4:

• The number of levels in your rubric is 4 (the highest amount of points that can be received per problem)
• The number of assessment criteria in your rubric is 5 (the number of problems being rated)
• Minimum passing grade is the lowest possible score a student can receive on the test (if a student scored all 1s - this is the grade they would get). What you set this as is up to you (or your school). I always set mine at 50 and would personally not recommend lower than this. ​

Once you’ve adjusted the settings, you can go in and add the scores of each of your students to find their percentage grade. It is important that you do not simply divide the number of total possible points by 100 to determine how much each point is worth. This completely defeats the purpose of a rubric.

I hope this has been helpful to you in learning how to properly grade your students’ Eureka assessments. Hopefully, you now have a thorough understanding of the different aspects of the Eureka curriculum and how they all work together to make our students great mathematicians. Now that you understand how Eureka works, we can start diving into the best practices for teaching Eureka. In the next post, we’ll take a look at using Eureka for whole group instruction versus small group instruction.