Pre-assessment tasks help you to find out what knowledge, experiences, skills
and attitudes your students have before you begin any science instruction.
In some instances, you might find it useful to have students write their responses
to a short set of simple questions on the topic. Examples might be: What is
air? Where do clouds come from? What are rocks made out of? What is a fossil?
At the upper elementary grades, concept maps and webs are good ways of seeing
what your students know and how they connect their ideas.
Younger students can make drawings or diagrams showing what they know about
concepts. For example, a student drawing our Solar System might put stars
next to planets or show all the planets the same size. By looking over what
your students produce, you can design lessons that address naïve or erroneous
understandings, as well as any lack of skills. It is important that you or
your students keep pre-assessment tasks safely, so that you can compare what
they knew before starting a topic to what they learn by the end.
While this part of the web site contains pre-assessments that have been developed
for the investigations on K-5 GeoSource, you may find them useful for other
lessons as well.
