Monday, June 16, 2014

Dane Redmond-Assignment 3A

I.                   The group of individuals that I decided to assess was four adolescents all going into the 11th grade this next school year.  They are relatives of mine (cousins) and will all be in taking Spanish III at their respective schools this next school year.
II.                I explained to the students the importance of the assessment and what I was hoping to accomplish.  They all appeared to be willing and ready to try the pre-assessment that I had planned.  It helped set the mood for the assessment as well.
III.             The assessment from assignment 2B that I decided to present to the group of four was the following: Students will fill in the blank of 5 sentences using verbs like gustar, encantar, interesar, and importar.  I made sure prior to selecting this pre-assessment that the group of students had already learned about Gustar and that they were familiar with how things work.  All but one of them still had a relatively good understanding of the content.
IV.             During the administration of the pre-assessment I found that the students were not quite familiar with the content that I had previously thought.  The assessment was given by me first briefly reviewing the verb “gustar.  I only spent about 4 to 5 minutes going over and reviewing its proper usage and giving definitions of encantar, importar, and interesar.  Following that I actually began the pre-assessment and gave each student 10 minutes to create 5 sentences using the verbs listed above.  They were told to use the verbs to accurately describe things that interested them or that were important to them.  I maintained close proximity to allow the students to have access to me if needed. 
V.                After the students completed the assessment I evaluated the effectiveness of the assessment.  When I considered all of the different challenges that doing a pre-assessment with a group of students you’ve never worked with before presents, it went fairly well.  Going into the assessment I knew that it was going to be a challenge to find a group of students that had any type of content knowledge close to what I was assessing.  This group did a good job working with me and completing the task.  Now, taking out the fact that the students were not my own and had a weak understanding of the content being assessed, I found some things that I could have improved.  First and foremost, I would have cut down on the time the assessment took.  Typically in a pre-assessment I like to have students complete the task and then go over it with them.  This is usually accomplished in a 10-12 minute window.  In this case, the assessment took closer to 18 minutes which is completely unacceptable for what I was trying to accomplish.  The rubric was still a good measurement of how to evaluate the pre-assessment results as it is very general in what its expectations are.  All of the students that participated clearly met the assignment completeness portion on the rubric.  Three of the four students fell into the fair category in the grammar column.  The one that fell into the poor was also the student that had the weakest understanding of the content upon starting the pre-assessment.  In the final column of the rubric, conjugations, two of the four students achieved excellence and the other two fell into fair on the rubric. 
VI.             Rubric:

Poor
Fair
Excellent
Assignment Completeness
Did not attempt
Partial completion
Fully completed.
Grammar
5 or more errors
2 to 4 errors
1 or no errors
Conjugations
5 errors or more
2-4 errors
1 or no errors

VII.          It really is difficult to determine the changes I would make to a rubric and pre-assessment when the group of students that I was working with was not ideal in any way.  If I were to base it 100% off of the four students I was working with there would be a good amount of change I would make.  I obviously would cut down the amount of sentences I required them to make, as it took too much time for them to write out 5 sentences using verbs like “gustar”.  It did not allow for enough time to go over their work with them and have a class share time.  I think that is an important component to pre-assessment and it should be done without it.  Even if I had my typical classroom students that I see every day, I probably still would cut it down from five to three sentences.  I think it may be beneficial to be a little more specific with my rubric, but I’m not sure if that is necessary for a pre-assessment as much as it is for a post assessment.  Overall it was a good experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment