The Best Interventions Start before an Assessment – The Importance of Pre-assessment.

I was listening to a podcast from Instruction Partners where Uri Treisman was discussing Rethinking Intervention and I immediately connected his thoughts to the focus of curriculum work and training so far this year. With the given times of the “covid gap” fears and the uncertainties of this school year I have really focused on ways to assess prior knowledge and what we as teachers are doing with the information.

In the podcast Mr. Treisman states “ you cannot help kids catch up by slowing them down.” This statement really resonated with me. I have heard fears from educators about needing to teach the content students missed in Mathematics last year or frontloading information to students that will help them with the grade level content for this year. I have learned about myself I find passion when I disagree with a statement and want to support the other side of that statement. So that led me to researching more strategies about assessing prior knowledge and how to use that data to scaffold students to grade level content.

While I am designing a PD session to offer my district teachers on assessing prior knowledge, I have a few favorite ways that I will share. I want to be clear that the most important piece to any preassessment is how you use the information to bridge student learning.

First and possible my favorite is a brain dump. A brain dump is simply “dumping” what is in your brain about a content onto a paper. You may have heard similar terms such as stop and jot where students are asked to write down everything they can about a topic, graphic, term etc. A brain dump can be used for both the purposes of recalling information throughout a unit or lesson, or as an access to prior knowledge before introducing a new standard. I have used it both ways in my classroom and love hearing the responses of students. A brain dump is easy to use virtually through a shared document such as a google Jamboard or Ideaboardz.

Another similar strategy is called Write the Room. You can physically hang posters in your classroom or make multiple slides students move to virtually. Each slide or poster has a vocabulary term, topic, or graphic on it and students add on to the poster with what they know. They can place a check next to a comment already written or add another thought or graphic to the poster. The only drawback to write the room is it can be difficult to see individual responses and prior knowledge.

I also love using a Which One Doesn’t Belong or Same But Different Math and have students respond. You can insert an image into a Google Jamboard and have students either initial Which One they say doesn’t belong with others and then verbally share their reasoning, or write their reasoning directly on the Jamboard. Same but Different can operate the same way where students grab a sticky note and initial the note with their thinking. Both of these sites can bring out students’ prior knowledge and vocabulary.

Once you have given a formative pre- assessment, how will you use that information to scaffold students to grade level Mathematics learning? If students are solving equations with variables on both sides in algebra 1 and your preassessment showed most of the class could solve two step equations correctly, do you just move on? What if most students could not solve a two step equation or multi-step with variables on one side? How do you scaffold your lesson so all students can reach the grade level target by the end of class? Mr. Treisman also stated in the podcast “go back selectively but in the context of moving forward(to grade level)” Being intentional about the scaffolding but remaining focused on the target is the best intervention we can provide for students. If our pre-assessment shows students struggled with order of operations the best way to move student learning forward is to incorporate order of operations work in the course work.

There are many sites to visit and articles to read on pre-assessment scaffolding but a few of some I enjoyed are here:

https://www.middleweb.com/36652/8-strategies-to-quickly-assess-prior-knowledge/

https://www.edutopia.org/article/activating-prior-knowledge-english-language-learners#:~:text=Activating%20prior%20knowledge%20means%20both,order%20to%20access%20upcoming%20content.

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber