Assessment Standard

Instead of editing my article, I am going to write a blog posts that talks about how I used my formative assessment to inform the next part of my lesson. My lesson was on solids, but was the beginning lesson on a unit about solids and liquids. Therefore, my formative assessment assessed the student’s knowledge about both of these topics. I asked the students to give me an example of a solid and a liquid and to explain why they drew a specific object for a solid or a liquid. To keep my formative assessment developmentally appropriate, I allowed the students to draw and write in hopes that they could at least complete one of those tasks. It was pretty clear very early on that a majority of the students in the classroom didn't have much knowledge about these two words. Even though I wouldn't have done this in my own classroom, my practicum teacher wanted me to give the students an example of both a solid and a liquid. The reason I wouldn't do this in my own classroom is because most of the students used both of those examples as the objects they drew so I didn't feel that this was a true assessment of what they knew. To explain their thinking about why they drew the object they drew for a solid and a liquid, most students wrote "because it is solid" or vice versa. This statement is true, but it didn't really get at their thinking behind this idea. This would be a good time for a follow up question such as: "How do you know that object is a solid?"

Even though my formative assessment may not have yielded the results I was hoping for, it still helped me inform my teaching. The formative assessment made me realize that these particular first grade students had limited knowledge about solids and liquids. Therefore, for my solids lesson I knew that I would have to start off as concrete as possible and give the students opportunities to explore solids in order for them to be able to make connections with what I was hoping to teach them. This would also help ensure my students were actively mentally engaged during the lesson. I chose to use the learning cycle as the framework for my lesson because I thought it fit well and would help incorporate aspects of the NOS into my lesson. Some reasons why I thought it fit with the NOS are because it was observational, it showed that science doesn't follow a step by step method, explicit/reflective, question driven, and it allowed the students to be creative and collaborative. I also knew that my lesson would need to incorporate open ended questions in order to get the students to reflect on their thinking. In order to do this, I included scaffolding and prompts to help guide the students in the desired direction. My lesson also incorporated small group and whole group discussion. This helped the student hear their peer’s ideas and helped me identify students schemas. I feel that by planning the lesson in this way, I was able to focus the lesson more on the student’s ideas and how I could best help learn the content.