Pre-assessment, Take 1: Assignment 3A

Pre-assessment is important to a teacher.  It allows the instructor to get a sense of what his or her students know and do not know.  With pre-assessment information, teachers can craft a lesson plan or plans that teach the students what they do not know and quickly review information that they have already mastered.

I am going to present a grammar unit to a class of eighth grade students, and I know that they’ve already had grammar – it’s not a foreign concept to them.  They’ve essentially been learning grammar since they stepped foot on their elementary school campus, and it’s likely that they were hearing and learning it at home before that.  This does not mean, however, that each of my students will have the same prior knowledge.  Because I’m working at the junior high level, my class will be made up of students from various elementary schools.  My students’ K-6 teachers are going to have stressed different grammatical topics.  In addition, each student will have retained different information about grammar.  This is why it will be important for me to pre-assess these eighth graders; they are going to know some things already, and I need to figure out what those things are so I do not waste time harping on something like nouns when the majority of students feel comfortable with nouns. 

That's me...teaching!

 

I used my Monday pre-assessment (a multiple choice test of 30 questions covering the eight parts of speech, subjects and predicates, clauses, comma splices, run-ons, fragments, and active and passive voice) to determine the grammatical knowledge of four of my family members as I do not have a class of my own (yet).  Before my “students”, Carol, Ryan, Tessa, and Matt, took the quiz, I let them know that they would receive full credit for completing all 30 questions to the best of their ability and that they would have 10 minutes to complete their task.  I also announced that I would be suspicious of the effort exerted by any student if he or she turned in a test after only 4 minutes.   After much snickering and teacher jokes, it took the four about 20 minutes (I let them have extra time)to complete the multiple choice test; this took far longer than I thought it would, so I will need to delete about half of the questions when I use this pre-assessment in an English Language Arts class.  The assessment findings were as follows:

Carol: +28/30

Matt: +15/30

Ryan: +24/30

Tessa: +18/30

 

When I asked the students how they felt about the test, Carol felt confident, but the other three admitted to feelings of inadequacy and remembered that they used to “know this stuff”.  However, all of them were collectively baffled by the terms “comma splice, run-on, and fragment”.  And each student demonstrated a different weakness.  Ryan and Tessa missed most of their points in the parts of speech section.  Carol only missed 2 questions, and both of them dealt with pronouns.  Matthew had the most trouble with comma splices, run-ons, and fragments.  To clarify, I asked Carol, Ryan, and Tessa how they had done so well on the comma splice/fragment/run-on section if they were unfamiliar with the terms.  In so many words, they let me know that these rules of grammar were innate for them:

“I could see there was a period missing and that the sentence was running on and on, so I figured that was a run-on.”  -- Ryan

“Fragments are by definition incomplete pieces of a greater whole, so I guessed that a fragment was an incomplete sentence” -- Tessa

                                          Carol   Ryan          Matt  Tessa

Perhaps my test subjects, being college-educated teachers, engineers, and medical consultants, were not the best indicators of the results that would be submitted by eighth grade students, but…it was the best class I could access at this time. 

The weaknesses presented by my students were varied.  On the other hand, most students understood nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, interjections, subjects, predicates, and active and passive voice.  If this were a real class, these strengths and weaknesses would help me decide what to spend more time explaining during the power point presentation. 

Overall, I feel that my pre-assessment and rubric were very effective.  The pre-assessment multiple-choice test got my students thinking about grammar they hadn’t touched upon in years.  They began reactivating that stored information.  The only thing I would change is the number of questions; I will trim the number of problems from 30 to 15.  In addition, I found that my rubric proved to be fair; this pre-test is not an assignment that was or should be graded.  Instead, points were earned for effort.