Whenever you walk into the doctor’s office, you don’t immediately see the doctor. You usually see a nurse who takes your pulse, checks your blood pressure, measures your temperature and then makes you step on the scale. All of this information is vital for the doctor to know before they ever see you because doctors understand the power of a quick patient pre-assessment before making any decisions about patient care.
Last school year shifted abruptly. Overnight, the entire school experience changed for students and teachers. Some teachers were told to teach no new content starting in March while other teachers were told they must continue teaching new content as they also navigated virtual teaching. Whatever your school district decided to do, a lot less standards-based learning happened during the final quarter of the school year.
Now we are in a new school year, and, like a doctor’s pre-assessment, we need to know the students’ vitals. We need to know what they retained from last year, what was never taught, what students already know and what we need to teach them. Pre-assessments are more important than ever in education because we can’t assume that they mastered last year’s standards. There are many different ways that you can quickly pre-assess your students to see what they know before you start your instruction.
Post-Assessment as a Pre-Assessment
Multiple choice should never be used in a pre-assessment. Never. Ever. You can have some students that are just really good guessers or have just enough knowledge to rule out the wrong choices, but still do not know the concept. You can use the same post-unit assessment you already have ready to go, take the multiple choice (if there is multiple choice), and give it to the students! The students can also use this to reflect at the end of your unit on their improvement. Using your end-of-the-year state test released items is another way to design your pre-assessment. Since the released items are labeled by standard, you can use the ones that apply to your unit to develop your pre-assessment.
True/False Statements
Give the students a set of true/false statements prior to teaching your unit. Have an area where the students can justify their thinking why the statement is true or false. These are a powerful way to see what misconceptions the students may have so that you can address them through questioning and number choice. Our email subscribers will receive a template with examples of true/false statements to use with your next pre-assessment.
Math Interviews
Give students two problems from your unit and ask them to talk you through how they solved the problems. If you are still in a virtual setting, this can easily be done as a recording so you can watch them at your own pace, or you can schedule one-on-one interviews. It is powerful to sit and listen to how your kids are thinking. You may find that students have a small gap in their understanding you can easily fix or may need a significant level of intervention to get to grade-level standards.
Vertical Alignment Questions
Since some of your students may be missing an entire quarter of math instruction from the previous year, another way to design pre-assessments is using multiple grade-level standard questions in your pre-assessment. Achieve the Core provides a coherence map (https://achievethecore.org/coherence-map/) that you can use to see your standard, what standards link to it from previous grade levels and where your standard is heading in future grade levels. It even includes example tasks or questions that you can use to design your pre-assessment. Including the linking standards in your pre-assessment can give you important information about how to differentiate for your students.
Watch our brief video on YouTube to learn how to use Achieve the Core website to create a pre-assessment for your students! Click on image:
Math Diagnostic
To really know your students, a math diagnostic tool can be an important way to know your students’ understanding in multiple domains. This can be time consuming to administer but the information is worth the time. A diagnostic allows you to dig deep about your students’ knowledge, make plans for whole-group and small-group instruction and show progress for students who are not at grade-level standards. We have a math diagnostic tool that is ready for you to use with your students in our shop!
However you decide to pre-assess, the knowledge of your students’ mathematical thinking will help drive your instruction. Like the doctor, once you know your students vitals, it is much easier to make informed decisions that will get your students what they need to achieve.
