The pre-assessment I chose to give for this unit consists of forty questions of various types that mainly deal with vocabulary and key ideas surrounding the Progressive Era. The first eight questions require student to match historical figures to their impact or historical importance. The next seventeen questions are multiple choice and test students’ ability group individuals and ideas, recall key legislation and reforms desired by progressives, and so on. There are six true/false questions which check for comprehension even further. Finally, I have the student analyze a map, a chart, and a short primary source document through a series of multiple choice questions. This last section was taken from previous EOI tests with the hopes of …show more content…
While this question does deal more with vocabulary, making it more understandable that so few students answered it correctly; I decided to work in activities that would continue building our source analysis skills nevertheless. One way I did this was during our lesson covering the Plessy v. Ferguson court case. I had students read both a primary and a secondary source and then answer questions that tested not only their knowledge and comprehension skills with respect to the sources, but also their evaluation and application skills as well.
In general, this pre-assessment allowed me to better understand where my classes stood with regards to the subject matter at hand. The knowledge I gleaned from this activity resulted in a more tailored and focused learning experience for my students which met them where they were instead of assuming what they did or didn’t know. My lessons were more appropriate for the learning environment as a result of giving a pre-test and at the end of the unit both the students and I will be able to have tangible proof that our time was not wasted. Learning occurred and this pre-assessment allows us to prove