Designing Assessments

Assessments. A word I hate the most. Why do we have to do it? Don't teachers know that assessments give students anxiety. I know I get shaky just by hearing the word. The worst part is we had to create one to give to our students.

Before heading into our fieldwork, we had to design a pre-assessment to test our second graders knowledge. Each group had to come up with 4 questions on their certain topic. Our topic was colonies gaining their independence. It was a bit difficult because we didn't know if our questions would be to easy or difficult. Originally we had different forms of question but once we saw the pre-test, we noticed that they were all changed to multiple choice. This taught me that when creating a pre-test I should focus on multiple choice types of questions. However, the pre-assessment didn't go so well, but it helped us figure out what we needed to teach. For example, we noticed that many of the students knew who the first president was, so as a group we decided not to spend to much time on it. However, one thing we noticed was that majority of the class didn't know anything about the thirteen colonies. As a group we decided to spend more time on this and even introduce it with a song. 

Once all the groups taught their lessons, we had to create another assessment, the post-assessment. As a group we had to come up with 5 questions this time. This helped us figure out if our students grasped the information and retained it. Creating the post-assessment was much easier than creating the pre-assessment.