Uncovering Misconceptions with Pre-Assessments

As Shapiro (1988) describes, traditional classrooms assumed that when students came to school, their minds were ‘blank slates’ ready to be filled with knowledge and ideas taught by the teacher. To be successful and succeed, students would have to recall facts and figures, regurgitate information on tests based on questions posed by their teachers. As we have observed from Heather in the Private Universe video, however, students do not come to school without any prior-knowledge and have many personal opinions and theories on different topics. They come from diverse backgrounds and have a wide range of different experiences. These experiences lead them to some misconceptions on various issues and topics. As teachers, it is essential to find out what students already know about topics and draw out any misconceptions to teach and guide students effectively. To do this teacher cannot assume that a student knows or does not know content before it is assessed or taught. They should have a multitude strategies in their toolkit to find out what students already know or think about a topic before any explicit teaching and assignments are given. Mix et al. (2013) reaffirm this idea by explaining that teachers often assume that young students have a strong conceptual understanding of multi-digit numbers early on in school. Because multi-digit numbers are commonly seen in the world around us, such as phone numbers, menus, addresses, etc. and they can read many young children we assume they know what they represent. Many children, however, struggle with knowing precisely what multidigit numbers represent and mean and how to break them apart. Explicit instruction and many hands-on experiences with manipulatives are often required for children to build their number sense to understand multi-digit numbers (Mix et al., 2013).

I am working at an IB school, and part of our pedagogical approach to teaching and learning is to administer different types of pre-assessments to find out what students know, or think they know on a subject before starting a new unit. I recently did a pre-assessment on mixed fractions where students had to tell me how they could divide ten chocolate bars evenly among four people. They then had to represent their answer using a fraction, words and pictures. I was fascinated by many of the student’s answers. Some students, for instance, wrote 2.5/10, while others wrote ‘two in a half’ (at first I thought this may have been because of his New Zealand accent but when I asked him to read his answer he was adamant it was two in a half and had an elaborate reason as to why). Others had no idea where to begin and could not come to a final answer. The data revealed that many students had no conceptual understanding of what mixed fractions were, while others had an abstract idea but could not represent their thinking concretely. From this pre-assessment, I was able to make strategy groups based on what students already knew before any explicit teaching on this outcome. The Private Universe video was a great reminder that assessments like these, as well as good questioning, is vital in the classroom and be should be embedded into practice across the curriculum.

References:

Mix, Kelly S., et al. “Young Children’s Interpretation of Multidigit Number Names: From Emerging Competence to Mastery.” Child Development, vol. 85, no. 3, June 2013, pp. 1306–1319., doi:10.1111/cdev.12197.

Shapiro, B. L., (1988). What children bring to light: Towards understanding what the primary school science learner is trying to do. In P. Fensham (Ed.), Development and dilemmas in science education. London: The Falmer Press.