Reflection About Assessment Experience (Post-Assessment)

By and large, I would say that our unit was successful. We covered the material very well

(especially considering the time that we had available and the intricacy of teaching compound and

complex sentences – and differentiating them) and the students were as engaged as we could have

expected. Teaching sentence structure can be incredibly dry for students, particularly at this age and

stage. To begin the school year with a unit that was largely comprised of “rules” and required a great

deal of lecture/explanation (and very little “fun”) was challenging.

Each time we were able to provide students with an interactive and hands-on activity, their

interest was apparent. For example, one of our foundational lessons was on complete subjects and

predicates. We were teaching the students about independent clauses and attempting to reinforce the

fact that independent clauses require both a subject and a predicate – that they are clauses which can

stand on their own as complete sentences.

We handed out index cards to students and had one half of the class write down a descriptive

subject. The other half wrote down a descriptive predicate. For example, a student writing a descriptive

subject might write down something like “The fat brown and purple platypus,” while a student creating

a descriptive predicate could say “galloped wildly over the rooftops.” We then paired each subject-

writing-student with a predicate-writing-student and had them write their complete sentence on the

board to be shared with the class. This was a fun and engaging lesson that helped build a foundation for

teaching compound and complex sentences.

Ultimately, we felt pressed for time and we had to assess the students a day or two before they

were ready to be tested (this was a result of a scheduled cross-town meeting). As expected, the scores

were not as consistently high as we would have liked. However, we did find that the students generally

improved their sentence-combining skills. Their understanding of proper nouns and capitalization

increased over the course of the unit, and they were largely able to identify and create compound

sentences. Complex sentences were introduced, but students did not appear to be at the point of

mastery.

During the cross-town meeting about the unit, all teachers agreed that there were issues with

the assessments. For example, some of the instructions weren’t clear, which led to confusion about

exactly what skill was being tested (i.e., understanding directions, following instructions, or the ability to

craft a compound sentence). Additionally, some of the content in the test questions was distracting and

may not have been appropriate and/or engaging for a 6th grade level (several sentences contained

information that 6th graders would not be familiar with – in both the pre-test and post-test).

Fortunately, the cross-town meeting doubled as an editing and revising session. The pre-test

and post-test were improved for use next year. We also discussed the skills that students still needed to

work on and planned to integrate mini-lessons throughout subsequent units during the school year. The

un-edited post-test is below (taken by the same student who took the pre-test).

The unit was moderately successful, but in the future, more appropriate assessments should be

used (both pre- and post- ) and there should be sufficient time devoted to teaching, modeling, and

practice. Students should be given adequate instruction and the ability to complete exercises in order to

promote mastery of the concepts.