hollie_journal1

Journal #1 January 27, 2009

For this assessment, the students were all sitting at their desks while the teacher walked around the classroom. In this whole-group setting, the teacher read a story aloud from the reading book while the students quietly followed along. The story was about a young caveman named Little Grunt who found an egg that hatched into a dinosaur, and he decided to keep it as a pet. After reading the story, the teacher wrote 2 questions on the board. The students were asked to answer the questions on their own in their Reader’s Notebooks so that the teacher could assess their comprehension of the story. Since this method of assessment was completed in the students’ Reader’s Notebooks, it was a pencil and paper type of constructive response. The students were required to answer the following questions by citing exact details from the story: 1. Is this story real or pretend? Use details from the story that let you know, and 2. How do you know it was hard for Little Grunt to say goodbye to George? While the students were writing their responses, the teacher and I guided those who needed some help, but we did not give students exact answers. To grade these constructive responses, the teacher explained to me that she has one rubric that she uses for all written responses. She also explained that the students are all aware of how they will be graded from a scale of 1 to 4 according to the rubric. After looking over many of the responses and the requirements on the rubric, it was clear that although many students were able to cite answers from the text to come up with solid responses, there were also some that struggled with finding details to support their answers. These students seemed to either have difficulty putting their thoughts on paper, or they came up with an answer that could not be cited from the text because it was not a reason found in the story. Finally, when all the students were finished, the teacher explained that there was not enough time to thoroughly go over their responses, but she allowed a few students to share what they had written. Overall, I thought that this assessment was a good way to get the students to think about the story and to demonstrate their comprehension of what was read. At this point, I noticed that many of the students had difficulty coming up with a constructive response after reading a text. For instance, many of them seemed to rely too much on being able to have the story right in front of them so that they could refer back to it. For the most part, I liked the way in which this assessment was given. I can definitely see how it could be beneficial to the students in the sense that it required them to find specific details from the story to create a constructive response based on what they had read. However, if I had to do something differently, I might have had the students fill out some sort of graphic organizer before answering the questions as a way for them to organize their thoughts. The only reason why I thought about doing this is because I noticed that many of the students came up with all their ideas before writing, and when they went to write a response, they had forgotten what they wanted to write about.
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