Observation #3/PreAssessment March 1

Today we went in during the same time as our last observation, and pulled two students out into the hallway at a time to give our assessment. I really want to upload it to the blog because I feel like it would be helpful to be able to see it as I talk about things I thought about, teachable and learnable (for me!) moments that occured and the thinking about our unit that I could not help but kick into.

As usual, there were students that did well and students that did poorly, as with any wide range of students, and the curious part was that the partners they entered the hall with were usually of their same reading ability, as the students are pre-grouped. The thoughts that were running through my head as I watched lightbulbs go off in first grade minds, and confused faces formed as students glared down at their paper were endless. I tried to take somewhat of a running record as we went through the exams and to write down larger issues that I could not help but struggle with.

-How do you stay neutral when you read answers during multiple choice?
-When students ask you questions that force you to say things not on the page, how do you ensure they are not confused without giving huge clues? Don't you want all of your students to take the exact same exam? How much can you say and how often can you say bland responses like "do your best? what do you think?"
-With directions and student attentions spans, even different modalities of learning and test taking speeds, how do you ensure student fairness but also tailor the administration to one student? When a student asks me "what is patriotic?" for the drawing sections of the test, it is really hard to answer that in ANY WAY.

Certain students had a hard time focusing or sitting still, and of course since two students were taking it at one time, there were moments when students were talking (even though we stressed it prior that this was a SILENT activity) and I often was worried that it would mess up the results. A few of the children were very aware of the idea of a "test" even when we simply introduced the activity as "trying to see what you know" and were concerned from the beginning with questions like "Did I get them all right?," "Is this a test?," and "Don't look at my answers!"

A few of the students who were less comfortable with their language skills used pictures to answer the questions later (which made me feel like they had done that in the past) or were completely silent and didn't make any answer choices, which led us to believe he/she was confused. At times students were more than willing to admit to their lack ofunderstanding - "I don't know I don't have anything to do" and other times they just flippantly circled away, grinned and handed it back to us.

The thing that I found interesting was the pacing of the test. One student would keep us waiting to read the next answer in a delayed choosing of answers, and some would move so far ahead that they would get problems wrong because they didn't read or hear the choices, or would interrupt to ask questions about sections we had not moved on to just yet.

One or two of the students had a firm grasp on the idea of multiple choice and would make comments to one or both of us between sections - "How can that answer be right? it's fake" or laughing at certain answers.

My favorite part was the last multiple choice questions where we asked students if they could successfully recite the Pledge of Allegiance - not to ACTUALLY do it, but YES/NO if they knew the words:

"Do I have to recite it right now?" -Student O
"Can I just write the Pledge all the way out right now?" - Student J

I was interested to know if the ESL students that said they knew it ACTUALLY knew it, had memorized it from the habit every morning and had no idea what it meant, or had already been exposed to both the words and their meanings.

The last part of the assessment asked the students to "Draw a picture of a Fourth of July celebration" and following to "Write a sentence about a favorite American tradition." Answers and pictures ranged from "food" to "GW" (for George Washington) and "Halloween because you get lots of candy" for the sentence section, and the pictures were mostly priceless illustrations of the Statue of Liberty, the American Flag, and of course, scribbles that represented "Fireworks, of course" ( <- Student A) The idea of patriotism meaning something different to everyone, and of course, as a choice as a citizen in a free country might be something that these first graders, who "do what they want", understand fairly well already.