After my recent presentation on promoting thinking, one of my points was moving from a focus on the final result for achievement to looking at progress (acknowledge James Nottingham for the prompt for this idea). Everyone agreed in principle that this was a wonderful idea! After a question, however, I thought that I should explain what I've learnt about pre-testing.
When to pre-test?
- There must be time for feedback - you cannot adequately pre-test in a particular lesson or at the start of a topic and hope to gain reliable information that you can use to differentiate learning. Rather, I suggest pre-testing a week in advance, which will give time to review students work and then plan for differentiated learning.
- The test should not be a full period and should not include challenging working mathematically questions. If should contain basic knowledge and skills only.
What to pre-test?
- Fundamental concepts that you wouldn't plan on teaching - this would provide valuable information as to whether students have the prior knowledge expected. If students don't, then doing this a week in advance will provide opportunity to differentiate learning at home to help get students a good foundation for the new topic.
- Basic concepts in the usual teaching program - most teachers would include these in a pre-test.
- All content in the teaching program - this would allow the most diverse range of information and provide information on those students who may already know most of the topic. It should be a short pre-test however.
Feedback to give students
- Giving students a mark of 0/20 on a pre-test is demoralising, even if you explain that students may not know any of the content and that we are trying to find where to start.
- Deciding not to return pre-test papers to students is not an option as students won't value it and may expect that the teacher will just throw them in the bin.
- Returning the pre-test papers with post-test is a good option, although the mark alone could be misleading due to the level of difficulty of questions. If you use exactly the same questions students will have seen them before. If you just change numbers, students know what to expect and may limit learning.
- Give feedback on skills. Rather than giving any marks (or even ticks!) give students a feedback sheet (or use a sticker to quickly tick and stick). Example of feedback can be on a scale Elementary, Developing, Fluent. The objectives can be linked to dot points, e.g. (A) can add or subtract fractions (B) can multiply fractions (C) can divide fractions.
How to pre-test
- Let students know that you will be starting a new topic in a week or so and you want to find out if they have learnt any of it already - they may not have and that's okay!
- Give them a 20 minute test testing a few foundational concepts, mostly basic concepts, ultimately all broad parts of the knowledge and skills in the topic.
- Give students feedback on whether they are developing or fluent at each of the broad areas being tested.
- Give students feedback after a post-test about how they have progressed.
- There are obvious implications for individualising learning, but I'll leave that for another time.
Have you tried pre-testing? What have you learnt?
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In my early years of teaching Maths, I was regularly asked the question "When are we going to use this?" In my first year of teaching, I was eager to answer every one of these queries - I quickly discovered that most of these questions were not asked to find out the answer, but rather to try and stump me as the teacher. Despite this, there are times when students genuinely want an answer. Here are some thoughts in answering this common question. There are several possible responses depending on the type of question that I will investigate over the next few posts.
This is a cop-out answer, although very true in many circumstances. Students like to know the use of Algebra, and with much of the beginnings of Algebra the truthful answer is that it is useful for further Mathematics.
