A Reflection on Pre-assessments

Nancy,

I wanted to show you a picture of our dog. His name is Scout and he is 5 months old.

I LOVE HIM!

Portia

Fulfilling The Promise

The Student Profile Survey and the Student Interest Survey have very valuable information. I think they could both be used for either grade and they both provide different things. I'll first start with the Student Profile Survey which is T.1 in the Toolbox of our book. It is simple and the students don't have to do a lot of writing, they simply have to put what is "like me" and what is "not like me." Not to be fooled of its simplicity it gives valuable information and I would use this information for grouping my students for sure. If students are more likely to wiggle while they are learning I would implement movement activities as part of their differentiation plan. If students like to work with words, numbers or objects I will make those available. Also in group work it is helpful to know who likes to work in a group, who likes to see the whole picture and so forth. It would be helpful to know which students are into detail because I may not want all of the students who are into detail in one group. This is a very good assessment for grouping and I can picture my self doing this in the first week of school. Next is figure T.2 in our book and it is the Student Interest Survey. This survey is similar to the one that we did for you at the beginning of the semester. I think that this survey is very helpful in getting to know our students individually. This survey is more complex and the students write more on this survey. I like that there is room for comments from the students and that they have to explain why they like doing something out of school. Two of my favorite questions are When have you felt really proud of yourself? Please explain why you felt that way. and What are some things you would like to learn about? Both of these questions I think really help students know that we care about them and also shows that we have interest in their thoughts. If I were to add something to this survey it would be along the lines of what you asked us, what are some of your emotional strengths and weaknesses. I am not sure that I would immediately insert that type of question, I would have to think about it. I also see myself doing this survey the first week of school. I think both of these assessments should be done in class because they open up different avenues for learning. I find it helpful that they give directions along with the assessments because if we were to ever recreate this, we could have some much needed guidance.

File of Inventories

I found the Index of Assessments and Pre-assessment grid helpful, I would use this grid for getting different Ideas and keeping things interesting. Also, this gives us a great resource for finding the right diagnosis for students when trying to solve what is best for their education. There are good ideas, and I think we should all adapt our own grid of ideas to go to that work for us.

In my last field experience we used The attitude and interest survey and it didn't work very well for me. We did something similar with Garfield faces that were happy, sort of happy, sort of sad and sad. When I did this inventory with the student I was working with for my case study he would interpret the questions like this, "well, if it is a Star Wars book, then I would like it, so I'll circle the happy face." I found that to be totally bias. If I didn't know that he was thinking Star Wars books only when circling the happy face I would assume that he in general liked reading all types of books. So the solution I thought of was putting a place for comments after the question so the student could say "I only like Star Wars books" instead of the miscommunication that could happen. However, I think that this would be great for younger grades because it is so visual, maybe they should be administered in small groups so you can hear comments like the one above.