Three Pre-assessment: Knowing Where Students Are as a Unit Begins
Three Pre-assessment: Knowing Where Students Are as a Unit Begins
The most important single factor influencing learning is what the student already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.
A colleague shared a story about her unfortunate initiation to swimming. At her first swimming lesson, the swim coach asked the children to line up on the side of the pool in one of three groups. "If you don't yet know how to swim, line up here," he said, pointing to the shallow end of the pool. "If you know how to stay afloat but aren't yet comfortable with swimming strokes, line up here," he continued, as he pointed to a stripe near the center of the pool. "And if you are already a confident swimmer," he concluded, "line up here near the diving board." Our colleague's dad had told her repeatedly throughout her early years that she could do whatever she wanted to do in life. At that moment, she wanted to be a confident swimmer, so she joined the group of children near the diving board. When the coach asked that group to jump in the water and swim, she had a quick lesson in gravity, and the coach-dressed in slacks, a polo shirt, and running shoes-had to jump in the water to fish her out.
In retrospect, the story is humorous. It was not funny to the aspiring young swimmer at the time, however. The humor is also lost on many students in many classrooms many times a year who find themselves sinking beneath curriculum that is, at that moment, too deep for their current skills, and on students who are ready to swim competitively and who are asked to stand in the shallow end of the pool while less experienced classmates learn to put their faces in the water.
A teacher who consistently and effectively uses pre-assessment makes an implicit statement that she has no intention of "delivering curriculum" without understanding the entry points her varied learners will bring to the content she will commend to them.
Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom
Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom
Pre-assessment helps the teacher locate the "area of the pool" appropriate for each student as a unit of study is about to begin.
Informal pre-assessment of students can take at least two paths. One occurs as a teacher observes or talks with students at the outset of a school year and in the weeks and months that follow in ways that inform how she will shape and differentiate a unit. For example, a third grade teacher who learns that she has seven students with a keen interest in dogs may offer the option of interviewing a veterinarian or a person who shows dogs when students conduct interviews as a basis for biographical writing they will do. As a social studies unit begins, a middle school teacher may conduct a somewhat more formal, but still indirect, pre-assessment of student comfort with a topic by asking students to use hand signals to rate themselves a one, two, or three in their comfort with using latitude and longitude to locate places. Both approaches give the teacher information that is potentially useful in planning for instruction, but neither is likely to provide information that is as systematic or available for study and review as more formal approaches to pre-assessment in which a teacher elicits or examines student work. For the specific purpose of identifying students' entry points, this sort of informal or indirect pre-assessment should be part of the fabric of differentiation-a teacher continually on the lookout for information that not only will provide some guidance for planning upcoming units of study, but also will help the teacher understand, connect with, and engender trust from students. Informal or indirect pre-assessment is less common than indirect or informal ongoing assessment, which we address more fully in Chapter Four.
In this chapter we examine more formal or direct pre-assessments of student readiness, interests, and learning profiles by providing explanations and examples for each category. We also explore the important question of how to make sense of and use pre-assessment information for instructional planning.