Pre-assessment
Why test students before you teach them?
We all know that the point of assessment is to find out whether students have learnt what you’ve taught them - so why would you assess them before you even start teaching?
There are six reasons to pre-assess your students.
1. Readiness
We can work out what students have been taught before by taking a look at last year’s curriculum map or scheme of work. But how confident are we that the content was actually taught and, more significantly, that students have understood and retained it?
Sometimes this matters and sometimes it doesn’t. In subjects with hierarchical knowledge architectures, understanding the next topic can depend heavily on whether students have grasped previous topics. The question to ask before teaching is are students ready to learn what I have planned?
2. Efficiency
Conversely, there is no point teaching content which students have already learnt. Even if we are confident that they haven’t been taught something in our subject before, what about where subjects intersect - like wave formation in geography and science or market segmentation in DT and Business?
Secondary school teachers may be surprised to learn that students covered topics at primary school, albeit at a simpler level.
It is unlikely that students will turn up in your classroom already secure in everything you want to teach them. However, it is equally unlikely that they won’t already know something.
3. Diversity
The eternal problem for classroom teachers is that all students begin the lesson from different starting points. We can either assume that the whole class knows nothing and so start from scratch, or attempt to establish the breadth and depth of prior knowledge for each student. The latter is an impossible task (at least in the time we have available), so the best we can do is assess students in a way that gives us an approximation of diversity.
There may be hinge concepts - prior knowledge that is critical to secure before advancing - that pre-assessment focusses on to ensure that every student is ready to progress (in a mastery fashion). Teasing out what students know about such hinge concepts can be a good focus for a starter activity.
4. Misconceptions
Students will arrive at a topic with misconceptions. Perhaps they believe that ‘survival of the fittest’ actually means only healthy animals survive, that multiplication always makes numbers bigger, that objects stop when they ‘run out of push’, or that light can travel around corners.
Some misconceptions matter more than others as they are fundamental to understanding a concept or proposition. It can be frustrating to teach a whole lesson only to find out that what you have taught has been completely misunderstood due to a misconception that most of the class hold.
5. Priming
Priming is when you promote retrieval of knowledge from long term memory so that it is ‘ready’ for new information to be assimilated. This is known to be an essential step for encoding new knowledge as we build schema.
Assessment is not the only way to prime students (any form of retrieval will work), and priming can occur during teaching, not just before. However, some retrieval of prior knowledge at the start of the topic can help put the content in context and provide a sense of continuity for students.1
6. Metacognition and motivation
Revealing students lack of knowledge and gaps in their knowledge can promote metacognition (the students’ ability to think about their learning) and motivation (the willingness to do something about these gaps). Indeed, some motivational theorists suggest that inquisitiveness - the allure of not knowing something - is all there is to motivation. Pre-assessment can inform you as to what students don’t know, but perhaps more importantly it makes the student themselves more aware.
A well-designed pre-assessment can mean students pay far greater attention to what is subsequently taught.
The pre-assessment dilemma
Now that we know why pre-assessment can be useful, we turn to how it is best done.
We face three dilemmas. First, that time is finite - every minute we spend assessing is a minute less teaching. Second, over what our aim should be - we cannot achieve all of the above purposes. Third, there are competing objectives and constraints - perhaps our school insists that lessons begin in a certain way.
This latter point is worth expanding upon. There has been a recent preoccupation with retrieval practice activities at the start of each lesson as we know that regularly retrieving prior learning helps secure knowledge in long term memory and strengthen recall. Some schools have stipulated particular approaches, like 5 questions at the start of every lesson, each reaching a little further back in time. Whilst frequent retrieval practice (if done well) is a good thing, such prescription means that teachers are not able to use the time for other things, like pre-assessment. It is almost certainly better to equip teachers with the toolkit and expertise to make their own decisions about lesson starts, whilst holding them to account for the quality of their decisions.
Broadly, there are two choices: go heavy or keep it light.
Going heavy means committing a significant chunk of time to pre-assessment, like a full-on test paper. This may be warranted if detailed and precise diagnostic information is required. For example, a maths teacher may arrive at a school which is in crisis - high staff turnover, no curriculum documentation and no assessment data. The teacher may need to establish a baseline of knowledge to even be able to work out what to teach.
We might also choose to carry out a comprehensive pre-assessment as part of a before-and-after assessment approach to evaluate the impact of a new curriculum or pedagogical approach, for example a move from mixed ability to set classes. ‘Bookend’ assessments often use the same assessment at start and end to measure as accurately as possible the learning gains.
Keeping it light is more common but also more challenging. Let’s say we have 5-10 minutes at the start of a topic to pre-assess students; what do we do?
We need an assessment task that is:
High ratio i.e. it enables the teacher to gain insights into the prior knowledge of every student.
Targeted on the critical concepts.
Discriminatory i.e. it distinguishes clearly between students who know and those who don’t.
Diagnostic i.e. it reveals misconceptions and partial understanding.
Challenging i.e. it requires students to think hard.
That’s a tall order!
A well-designed set of multiple choice questions, a problem solving task, or some rapid-fire recall questions using a high-ratio response technique like mini whiteboards may be in our pre-assessment toolkit. The choice depends on which purpose you prioritise, which subject you teach, and the nature of the students in front of you.
Whatever we do will be imperfect and a compromise - the curse of the classroom teacher!