Tests Galore – Blog 7
Moorea C -
Hi everyone! I hope all of you are having a great day as always 🙂 This week’s work was spent mainly in the classroom as I had the students complete their pretests!
On Wednesday, I went into the classroom to do observations like I did the previous week and it was super fun! My favorite part of that day was watching the students faces light up as they walked into the classroom and noticed me sitting down. They were all so sweet and excited to see me and ask me all of their little questions that they had. I spent the day helping around in the classroom whenever students raised their hands and also whenever the teachers asked me to work with certain students or complete certain tasks. I was also able to show Ms. Sproull, the math/science teacher for 2nd/3rd grade that I am working with, my curriculum for the two grades and got the green light on everything I have planned which was awesome! She even introduced me to the English teacher for those grades so that I could go over my literary materials with her to make sure everything was grade appropriate and easy enough for them to read through.
As for the pretests, I spent the day in the classroom again on Friday to have all of the students complete them. This process wasn’t too difficult as all I was doing teaching-wise was just explaining to the students that it was simply a test to see what they knew and that it wasn’t anything to worry over. For the 3rd graders, I passed out the tests and Ms. Sproull helped me assign everyone a number to write down instead of their name. I then explained to them that it wasn’t for a grade and also let them know that if they needed help reading anything to just raise a hand and I would come over. For the 2nd graders it was the same exact process except for the fact that I actually read the test questions and answers out loud to the students. I did this because 2nd grade in general tends to have a lot of mixed level readers, so reading it out loud was just an easier process to ensure that all of the students understood what each question was asking.
Once all the students were done, I collected the tests and started grading them. The grading itself wasn’t difficult and I was able to get a good system down pretty quickly. However, once I started analyzing the data and looking at the mean and median scores of everything that’s when it started getting a little tricky. I will touch on this more next week, but my plan is to figure out how to put everything into excel to do item analysis and look at every single question and look at the most common answers per question per class to find out which topics I can quickly cover during class and which topics I will need to spend some more time on.
Overall, this week was really fun being able to spend some time with the students and I am beyond excited to begin the final step of my research by teaching the 2nd graders next week!
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