Let's Assess!

Pre-assessment is crucial in the field of education. It is important for teachers of all ages to pre-assess students’ knowledge before teaching a certain topic. 

At first, our group had a hard time understanding exactly what we needed to include in our pre-test. With some talking through we finally understood that we needed to ask the students some questions about the topics we would be teaching them in our lesson plans and also what they already learned about the topic. We taught the students about our country’s leaders. I didn’t realize how important a pre-assessment was until this class. Pre-assessments are very helpful for teachers to see what information students may have about a given topic and what misconceptions the class may have in order to figure out the appropriate approach to teaching the lessons. Our group developed our pre-test questions together. For the post-test we edited some of the pre-existing questions and then we added some new questions to be able to see how much the student’s learned from our lessons. We all agreed on particular questions that we felt would be the most useful in our assessment of seeing how much the students knew and how much they actually understood and remembered by the end. The pre-test questions were fairly easy to create and our group didn’t have many issues.

The only problems we had was due to confusion on what we needed to include in a pre-assessment question. However, we learned that when asking questions during the pre-assessment we should use more “broad” questions rather than specific. This helps us to see what the students personally know about certain topics as a whole. They might recognize or remember certain words or topics but not in detail. The post-test questions were fairly easy to create because we were able to look back at what we taught the students and what we asked in the pre-assessment to adjust some questions and then add some more specific questions that they should have definitely gotten from our lessons. Since out chapter on Choosing Our Country’s Leaders was brief, there was a limited amount of information and vocabulary words which also posed a little bit of a problem when trying to create these questions. The results of the pre-test were helpful in establishing the necessities of our lesson plan and in figuring out which topics and vocabulary terms were more important to focus on over others. The results helped our group to see how  much the student’s really knew and what information our lessons should focus on more. This also showed the lack or overlay of knowledge that many students had. Some students were able to answer all of our questions correctly while others had answered none of the questions accurately. From looking at the answers that the student’s wrote on the pre-assessment it was obvious that most to all students knew what a president was and who the current president was. We could also tell this by the first day we met the students. We asked them information about our country’s leaders and many of the students mentioned the president. However, students did not know much about what made an ‘active citizen’ and what the leader of a state is as well as what a capital was.

 By this we knew that we had to focus on these terms and on voting especially, which we did in our inquiry and cooperative lessons. Since the students were in second grade, we felt that we needed to approach our lessons on voting and citizens with a hands-on approach, as we did with the voting booth. By bringing the student’s into the actual process, they were able to comprehend the task in a different way and will most likely remember it for years to come. In addition our group referred to the real-world often in order to bring our lessons to life. We said that their own principal would be retiring and we had them vote on ice cream flavors in their own cafeteria and when the future principals answered their interview questions, their answers reflected changes that would affect them personally. This helped students to see how important their personal vote was in making a change! The results of the pre-test also were helpful when relating to the edTPA commentary prompts because it helped our group and me to see what we needed to do to make sure that this information was being taught to the students in a simple and understandable way that the student’s would walk away knowing the information. The edTPA commentaries were beneficial for all groups in designing their lesson plans and unit plans to maximize their teaching potentials.