Assessments

The purpose of a pre-assessment is to identify and determine the areas of strength and areas of improvement before starting a lesson or unit with students. The test is low-stakes and the data from the assessment is solely for the teacher to review and analyze to get a sense of the prior knowledge that students have about a topic or area, and then adjust the lesson(s) to meet the needs of the students. The teacher can make the decision based on the data if there are any misconceptions or areas to review and discuss before starting the lesson or unit. In order to prevent discouraging students, the pre-assessment results should be for the teacher only, or showed to students after the summative assessment to show student progress.

The purpose of a formative assessment is to check for students understanding about the topic or subject, make adjustments to practice, address any questions or misconceptions, and track academic progress during a lesson. There is a wide variety of ways and methods to formatively assess students during a lesson, including scaffolding questions to prompt students and redirect students if necessary. The teacher can use the information gathered during the lesson to make changes to benefit the students and explicitly teach and go over any areas of confusion. Each lesson should include one or more essential questions that will be the focus of the lesson. There are two types of formative assessments, informal and formal.

The purpose of a summative assessment is to evaluate what students learned after a unit was taught. The test is high-stakes and an accumulation of all of the topics and subjects students learned from the unit as a whole. The teacher uses the data to identify and determine the areas of strength and areas of improvement after the unit was completed. The essential questions from the lessons in the unit should be addressed in the summative assessment to gage if students understood the overarching purpose of each lesson. The teacher can compare the results from the pre-assessment and the summative assessment to track students progress and determine if there are any areas that need to be reviewed before moving forward into a new unit.