USING PRE-ASSESSMENT FOR DIFFERENTIATION

                                

                                      PRE-ASSESSMENT FOR DIFFERENTIATION

Pre-assessment helps to determine students’ prior knowledge and also their strengths and weaknesses. At the beginning of a new unit, pre-assessment can provide useful information about their readiness to start new instruction. Then, the teacher can adapt the difficulty of his subsequent lessons accordingly. Based on a pre-assessment, a teacher can differentiate his instruction. Highlighting some pre-assessment questions derived from the learning objectives and/or target standard seems to make the most sense.

teacher use the results of the pre-assessment to help guide, differentiate, and challenge students (depending on how the students do on the pre-assessment). 

For this unit, grade three math, I prepared lesson on addition and subtraction of money. At the end of the unit students are supposed  to meet with the objectives for each lesson throughout the unit, but before then a pre-assessment test is conducted to know the level of student knowledge about the topic. 

Pre-assessment will be used to assess students’ prior knowledge, with this I will be able to know where students need more help and think of strategies I could employ for differentiation.

This blog post will be a comprehensive report that includes a pre-assessment test developed for an 3rd grade mathematics unit on Money, project based. 

  It’ll also include innovative differentiation strategies for different groups of students, depending on how they perform on the pre-assessment quiz. 

I created a pre-assessment quiz using quizlet. The quiz can be access here.....Quizlet. 

When the pre-assessment is done, I will analyze the result and will be able to differentiate level of understanding of students before entering the unit.

For the purpose of this activity students will be classified as:

• High level students. Students who answered most often including the most difficult of the pre-assessment question correctly.
• Middle level students. Students who have some knowledge about the topic as shown in their score, but need to develop higher order thinking skills.
• Low level students. Students who appear to have limited knowledge about the topic

For consolidation of this report and to bring effective discussion on the pre-assessment here is a Lucidchart illustration for differentiation after the pre-assessment.

The flowchart also provides examples of assessments I could use for each group, along with differentiated instruction strategies I could implement for each group. There will also be a project based activity that will engage students and give them the opportunity to personalize their learning. I described in the chart that high level students will be given complex worksheet and they will be used to peer teach others, they will also be given access to online extension activities. There will be regular check in for the middle level students, they will do extra practice, collaborative work and also independent task. The low level students will be given more time to complete task, videos and manipulative will be used for clearer understanding. One-on-one, and modeling gradual release strategy will be effective for this group.

I can say that  pre-assessments help establish a baseline and one can form groups based on students’ prior knowledge. Without accessing and understanding students’ prior knowledge , how can a teacher be confident that he/she is spending class time wisely with meaningful learning experiences for the students and students' prior knowledge. With this pre-assessment teachers can implement differentiated instruction and specific assessment for each group of students.