Jack Vander Sluis Education 302 Walcott / Keeley 28 April 2014 Assessment Assessing students in a history class is harder

than I anticipated. Because there is so much information to cover that written tests are the best way to assess fact based knowledge; but in order to assess understanding of higher order concepts and bigger ideas written assignments and discussion seem to be the best form of assessment. As far as self-assessment goes, I think that small group work is the most effective because it allows students to compare their knowledge with that of their peers in a more comfortable setting than whole class discussions. For my unit plan I am using different forms of pre-assessment, formative (for learning) assessment, formative (as learning) assessment, and summative assessment. For pre-assessment I use warm-up questions at the beginning of every lesson. These are used for me to gage the students understanding of a particular part of the lesson before I teach it, as well as for students to measure their growth in their own understanding of the material. Formative assessment is the most common form of assessment that is used, but it is also the hardest to accurately assess. During class discussions I will be monitoring willingness to be discuss, quality of discussion, and whether or not ideas are being expressed clearly and articulately. Students have the opportunity to self assess themselves during these class discussions, but more so during small group work and discussions. In small groups students only have a few people to share and collaborate with so there is less pressure for students that may be nervous with sharing their thoughts. Verbalizing what each student knows helps that student to have a clear understanding of what they know and what they dont know. This also gives students the opportunity to compare their own understanding to the other students.

Summative assessment, which takes place at the end of the unit, as well as with an assignment after a few of the classes, is done with writing assignments as well as a final culminating group project. The writing assignments are anywhere from one paragraph to one page, for example, after my first lesson, which focuses in on the issues that led to change in the 1950s, students will get into small groups and create a Google document analyzing an issue that came up after WWII, figure out how it was resolved, and evaluate who was affected; and after lesson two, which is focuses in on different aspects of The American Dream, students will be reading an article on the negative effects of consumerism on teenagers and writing a page on what the article said and what their own opinion on the subject. I will use this assignment to assess students knowledge of the effects of consumerism, but also to challenge students to think about how they are affected in their own lives. The final summative assessment that I am using for this unit plan is a group project. In this group project students will work in groups of two or three to design a television schedule (8am-11pm) that could have been in the 1950s. Students will do this by researching pop culture from the 1950s and by drawing from the lessons that we have gone through. I am requiring that students analyze each aspect of their T.V. schedule and explain the relevance to the 1950s. By doing this students will not only be identifying pop culture that was prevalent in post-WWII America, but they will also be analyzing the culture, values, and ideals of the 1950s. This project is more engaging than a written test and also gets students to go deeper into the content than answering short answer questions or filling in multiple-choice questions. It is impossible to assess as wide of a range of content with a project like this compared to if I was to give a written test, but I believe that it adequately assess students understanding of the content while also spiking interest in the material.