Woodcock Johnson IV Reflection Essay

Summary I gain a lot of insight and learning from going through the process of identifying a student, getting to know them, administering a variety of assessments, writing about and interpreting the test results, researching interventions and supports, and making recommendations based on all of the information collected. My two main takeaways are that I had some difficulties with Woodcock Johnson IV assessment and that I significantly changed my mind about the pedagogy of math. I struggled with administering and interpreting the Woodcock Johnson IV. While I was administering the test it was difficult to just follow the script and not prompt the student to think about the question longer or review their work before they had a final answer. …show more content…
While I was interpreting the test data I thought about my observations of the student during testing. The observation of the length of time he spent on problems and his often use of his fingers to calculate basic math, initiated my research. I began finding a plethora of research about the importance of math fluency for student success. Math fluency is a student’s ability to quickly recall math facts. A student who has developed automaticity with basic math facts is able to use their entire working memory on the higher level math instead of squandering some of their limited working memory to figure out all of the math facts necessary to solve the problem. All of this research contradicted my pedagogy of teaching math, which was significantly bases on my experience of learning math. For me math was always a slow process and still to this day I do not have automaticity with my basic math facts. I constantly have to figure out basic math facts like 8 times 7. I believed that my ability to use quick reasoning of lower math facts to calculate the need math fact, made me stronger at math. I still maintain the belief that the skill of breaking down problems in two parts you know to find the solution is