Pre-assessment and corresponding strategies

---Yanhua Wang

When a teacher is going to prepare lesson plans, a very important thing to know is students’ levels. In this case, pre-assessment seems very necessary and useful. Pre-assessment is a test students can take before a new unit to find out what the students need more instruction on and what they may already know. Pre-assessment is a way to save teachers time within the classroom while teaching new material. Experienced teachers know that if a student lefts behind and no measure is taking by both himself/herself and the teacher, he/her will finally loses interest and confidence in the subject. And at that time it will be extremely hard to pull him/her up again.

When I begin a new unit, I usually would like to not only review the previous unit, but also ask my students to do some pre-homework about the topic they are going to learn. On one hand, they won’t forget the knowledge they have learned, on the other hand, they will have a general idea of what they are going to learn. A quiz or game levels from easy, medium to hard and analyzes automatically helps me easily know my students’ levels. For pre-assessment, I recommend quizlet or kahoot.

In the unit “fruit & color”, I make a game and a quiz in quizlet. There are combined questions, which includes: “phonetics”, “words”, “expressions” and “sentences”. Students who answer the questions fast and correctly win.

        

The game:

The test:

After the pre-assessment, students are arranged to three different groups:

• the 5 students who answered most, including the most difficult, of the pre-assessment questions correctly
• the 12 students who have some knowledge about the topic as shown in their score, but need to develop higher order thinking skills
• the 5 students who appear to have limited knowledge about the topic

According to their performance, different strategies are taken to help them in new unit learning. Innovative Differentiation Strategies

  

With pre-assessment pre-lesson and various strategies used during the lesson learning. Students not only learn in an interesting and happy environment, but also improve their academic performance dramatically.