Preassesment

The pre-assessment was an interesting experience. We wanted to keep the tasks simple and avoid multiple choice questions to get a full scope of what the children actually know, not how good they are at guessing. Janelle, Ms S, and I were all very clear when handing out the task to reassure the kids that this was just to see what they knew and would not be graded. They had received pre-assessments before and seem to understand the concept. However, once we passed them out the kids started to freak out. Many of them quickly became frustrated and could only answer one of the questions and some could not answer any of them. It caused quite an uproar with many of the kids. Even on parts that we thought would be somewhat simple, such as labeling Virginia on a map of Virginia and its five surrounding states, many students were unable to complete.

One thing I learned from this is despite knowing that an assignment is going to be graded students can become frustrated easily. We asked the teacher about whether or not our task was too difficult. She informed us that 4th grade is when the students begin to learn about Virginia and the US and that many of the students had no prior knowledge of any of the topics we were to cover. So one big piece of information we learned from the pre-assessment was that we had our work cut out for us. We would be working with little prior knowledge and had a lot of new knowledge to build.