01. Pre-assessment and Analysis
Candidate assesses the knowledge and skills of students in relation to long-term content goals and district standards and determines the knowledge and skills each student needs to meet the goals and standards.
As I have stated on other pages, I have worked on the 7th grade power standards. These power standards list out what are the concepts that every 7th grader should have in order to accomplish the minimum level of competency. Power Standards With these I have been able to create pretests and posttests that match these standards. By doing unit pretests I am able to see strong points and weak areas that I need to focus on. It is a lot like going to the doctor. Someone has told the doctor what the minimum standard for what being healthy is. When he examines the patient he looks for the problem areas and the positive areas. That is what I do with pretesting. I have, in the past, given the students back their pretest along with their posttest so the student can see growth. My advanced students have the most problem with this because I have found that they do not see the growth but the grade. Also, my advanced students usually have mastered the concepts at grade level so they will traditionally already do well on the pretest.
I also use pretests as a means to guide instruction. If I have a set of students that know the basics of the unit I will not spend as much time on that portion of the unit as if they were a group of students who do not have any of the basic skills that are needed for the unit. I look at the scores of the pretest and the quizzes to decide seating charts, if I need to reteach concepts, and a variety of other interventions. This is a tool to help me help my students get the most out of their time in my classroom.
For example, If I have a students that does not understand the concept of exponents as in the pre test for unit 4, I would have the students look at where exponents are used and bring in examples of these (like medical lab reports). Next we would look at the numbers that the examples really are and discuss the need to have exponents. This will finally lead into the explicit instruction of exponents. The students that have already mastered the skill would do research about exponents discussing the various aaspects including, but not limited to, where it was first used and the many places that use exponents.
