Assessment of the Students

When your a teacher accountability is very important. You must be able to show that what you have done, helped the students learn. One way to do so is to give the student pre-and post-assessments. Pre-tests serve a way of getting understanding of how much the students know or do not know to better create a lesson. In a unit plan, if the students showed that they knew a lot about a topic such as George Washington, but they knew very little about political parties, then in the lesson the teacher can give a brief overview of George Washington to focus on political parties. Then the post-test at the end of the unit tells the teacher just how much the students have learned and if she needs to go back an reteach any part of the lesson. My group taught about the Young United States, so our pre-assessment questions were "what is a political party?". "inauguration is when the president is sworn into office by declaring his/her loyalty to the constitution: true or false", "Who was the first president of the United States?", and a question in which the students had to match the term to the definition. I was a bit difficult coming up with these questions because we had to find a balance between being too difficult and too easy. I believe we were able to achieve a good balance. We then used the results to focus on the political parties and the expedition of Lewis and Clark. In the post-test, we kept the questions asking the students about political parties inauguration and added new questions about Thomas Jefferson, the War of 1812, and the expedition of Lewis and Clark. The results of the post-test showed that the majority of the students got all of the questions right except for the question about political parties. This showed us that the students need to be retaught what political parties are and what their purpose is. This information is very important to use in the edTPA commentaries because it shows that the majority of our lesson was successful, but we needed to spend more time on political parties.