Pre-assessment is a tool for teachers to learn what their students
know about a unit before beginning the actual instruction. In my experience
pre-assessment is very valuable. It can help a teacher know where to adjust
instruction and who in the class might need more help in the coming days. It
also gives the students a little peek at what is coming and can help them to
prepare for what is next. You might only think of pre-tests (like you had in
middle school algebra class) as the only form a pre-assessment can take but in
actuality they can take many forms. Discussions, written responses, KWL charts
(know, want to know, and learned), graffiti walls (where students artistically
show what they know about a given topic) are just a few forms that
pre-assessment can take.
In a recent class I designed a two week unit plan for
teaching about flash fiction. This is a form of creative prose writing that is
only limited by size. The author tries to tell a story that is complete and
interesting in a short amount of words. The length depends on the place you
might publish or in my students case the whims of their teacher. My unit spends
4 days learning and researching about flash fiction as a genre and reading as
much flash fiction as possible. The last 6 days are about practicing what they have
learned by creating lots of their own flash fiction and then finally using one finally
short-short story to show their skills in writing flash fiction.
The beginning of my unit has a simple and informal pre-assessment.
I write am actual piece of flash fiction on the board and as they come into
class I ask students to write down their reaction to the story and if it is a
story and why. Why don’t you give this pre-assessment a shot yourself? The
story, attributed to Hemingway is posted on my “board” below.
Let me know how you do on the pre-assessment in the comments
below.
To see how this assessment might work for real students and
not just in my head I asked several family members and friends to give it a try
for me. Thankfully I have awesome people in my life who didn’t mind giving me
some time to test this out.
The reactions were fun to read and I was glad I gave this a
shot. All but one “student” thought that the writing on the board was not a
story. They identified it as an advertisement. Several “students” pointed out
that it was lacking a beginning, middle, and end which a story must have. They all
thought it was to short. Only one person thought that it could be a story because
it got her to think and imagine. She was interested in knowing more and wished
the author had kept writing.
These are the responses I was expecting and also wanting. It
was great that they could argue that the story was incomplete and missing
essential parts. The idea that this was a story made them just a bit mad and
they felt compelled to explain why they were mad. My goal with this assessment
it two fold. First I wanted to get my students thinking about length when
related to a story, and this was certainly accomplished. Second I wanted to
know if any students had experience with very short fiction and I believe my one
“student” who was intrigued knew where the lesson was headed. It also doesn’t
hurt that this story is so “offensively” short that when students later see a
story with just 200 words they are more willing to think of it as a story because
it is so much longer than this one.
In the end this pre-assessment did what I wanted it to and
will be a good fit for this unit. I also showed some of the “students” my
rubric for the end of the unit portfolio. They all understood the things that
would be required in the unit and felt that it was fair. I hadn’t ever thought
of showing students rubrics this far in advance but I liked doing it this way.
The students will know and understand right away what is expected of them and
what to focus on in the unit. I will certainly be showing rubrics to my
students early more often.
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