Pre-Assessment Analysis

The pre assessment I chose was a “matching” type of assessment. I selected ten key words, organizations and people who were central to the content of Democracy and Progress and just wanted my students to see if they were familiar with them.

The reason I chose this particular assessment was because I knew that my students were not familiar with the subjects or topics at hand. I had done research into the curriculum of their past history courses and knew that they have not had the classroom opportunity to learn about the suffrage movement in Britain, colonization of British colonies or the spread of mass culture.

To grade this assessment, I simply assessed their ability to match the right word, person or organization to the correct description.

The results of my pre-assessment, I felt were exactly where they should be. My students did fairly poorly overall, and very few of the answers I wished for them to know about. No student scored a perfect score; however the highest was 7 out of 10 the average score was 30.4%. When I saw that this was the knowledge base of my students, I knew that I had my work cut out for me. Although I know that these scores do not tell me much about how much they really do know, I assumed that they knew nothing of the content I was to teach; therefore I could manipulate my lessons accordingly when I find out what they truly know.

One student who I chose to center my focus on was Cory. He was very quiet and considered one of the “unique” students due to his interests in a more alternative avenue of pop culture. He intrigued me due to his personality and also due to the constant high quality work I received from him throughout my time in the classroom. He would interject very thoughtful questions and always put time and effort into his assignments; for example, I assigned a writing activity to describe an invention discussed in class and he asked if he could complete it at home. The next day, he handed in his assignment, typed and much longer than the required length. Needless to say, Cory should be considered TAG and I have since talked with my mentor teacher about going through the process of recommending him for TAG status.

I divided the class into the sub-groups via gender. Boys, on the pre assessment, did about one percent worse than the girls on average. The girl’s average was 28.75% while the boy’s had an average of 27.6%.

I feel this assessment was not a good representation of my student’s knowledge. I feel it mainly assessed their ability to match correctly opposed to diving into the depth of knowledge within my student’s brains. However, my goal (Understand the causes, characteristics, lasting influence and impact of political, economic and social developments in world history), is incorporated into my pre-assessment through using terms, organizations and people that are constantly seen throughout my lessons. My objectives are not represented within the pre-assessment aside from using the main people, terms etc that are learned throughout my lessons.