MichellePaquinJournal1

Michelle Paquin EDC 452 2/4/09 Assessment Journal #1

Throughout the day I spent in the third grade at Glen Hills Elementary, I observed several different types of assessments by the teacher. However, specifically, I observed the spelling tests and pre-tests. During the spelling tests, each student has the ten words that they misspelled from the pre-test written in their planner. Each student has a partner. The students take turns reading their partners words to them, while standing behind them. Once both students complete their tests, they are handed in and the students wait until the entire class has completed their tests. Immediately following the spelling tests, the students take the pre-test for the following chapter. This type of assessment falls into the category of pre-assessment. In this type of assessment, the students set up their papers, numbered 1-15. I gave them their pre-test in the following action; by reading the word, followed by the sentence in the book, followed by repeating the word. Each student writes how he or she think the word is spelled. After reading through all fifteen words, I repeat only the words so the students can check what they have written. The pre-tests are then collected and corrected. I was fortunate enough to give the pre-test, as well as correct them. The way that my cooperating teacher corrects the pre-tests is excellent. Each word that the student gets wrong is re-written at the bottom of their pre-test. However, the test will only consist of ten words. Therefore, if a student gets more than ten words incorrect, the teacher just chooses any ten words. Also, some students get less than ten words incorrect. In this case, the words given to the student come from the five “challenge words” also listed. If more words are needed, which is the case for at least five children each week, the teacher chooses the remaining words from a list of about fifteen words at the end of the chapter that share the same theme. As I corrected the pre-tests, the average of the class gets about seven words incorrect. However, there are always about five students who only get two or three incorrect words. These are almost always the high-performing students of the class. I believe that this form of assessment has many positive and negative aspects to it. I think that the way the teacher conducts the pre-test is excellent because she is able to retest the students on words that they have misspelled. However, if the students spell a word correctly, she chooses from another set of more challenging words so that the student is not being tested on words that they already know how to spell. This gives the students more of a challenge because they have one week to study these specific words. Also, I feel as though the one-to-one spelling tests in which each student reads the words to their partner is also effective. It gets the students to work on social skills, responsibility, trust, communication skills, peer interaction, and practice in vocabulary and speaking clearly to one another. However, this form of assessment can also have negative aspects. Since this is a one-to-one activity with students, some do tend to lose focus and take too long to complete their tests, or cannot concentrate because of the noise. There is a lot of noise going on in the classroom because there are ten people speaking at the same time. However, since every student is being tested on different words, this is one of the only ways that it will get done in a reasonable amount of time.

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