Pre-Assessment

 Pre-Assessment for Differentiation

As a K5 Special Education Teacher,  assessments are used throughout the year to gain valuable information regarding what students know. When teaching unit lesson plans, I like to use formative assessments such as Pre-Assessment at the beginning of a lesson. This helps me identify three groups of students; the five students who answered most, including the most difficult, of the Pre-Assessment questions correctly, the 12 students who have some knowledge about the topic as shown in their score, but need to develop higher order thinking skills, and the 5 students who appear to have limited knowledge about the topic.

This link is the Pre-Assessment I developed for ELA lesson about nouns. The objective for the lesson was students will be able to identify and use nouns in a sentence.

https://quizlet.com/276686502/nouns-pre-assessment-flash-cards/

After I have identified the three types of students by using a the pre-assessment, I am able to decide what innovative differentiation strategy works best for the students. Strategies that will work for the three types of students include one to one staff to student pairing. This will help the students who have limited knowledge about the topic by giving them that extra support so they do not feel down about not knowing something. In my special education classroom, we are fortunate to have enough para educators to assist in the one to one staff to student pairing.

Another strategy I would like to use involves splitting up the three groups of students. By having a project based learning project involving the parts of speech, the group who has limited knowledge about parts of speech can begin researching all about nouns, adjectives, and verbs using 21st century skills on the computer. The  students who have some knowledge about the topic can gather as a group so that they can create and discuss  a list of what they think are nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The last group of students who have limited knowledge about the topic can be in a group learning all about the definitions of parts of speech by watching a video. I like to run groups in stations, so to give every student an opportunity I would have the groups rotate stations daily.

Here is a link to a Mind map illustrating these strategies.

https://mm.tt/1054851255?t=at1eSwJnlZ

In conclusion, every student is different so it is important to adapt differentiation in to lesson instruction. 

References:

A. (n.d.). Differentiation: It Starts with Pre-Assessment. Retrieved March 09, 2018, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec13/vol71/num04/Differentiation@_It_Starts_with_Pre-Assessment.aspx

5. Pre-assessment Ideas - Differentiation & LR Information for SAS Teachers. (n.d.). Retrieved March 09, 2018, from https://sites.google.com/site/lrtsas/differentiation/5-preassessment-ideas