One
of the most important aspects of teaching science, and teaching in general,
is to understand that different students learn in different ways.
Since this is an important part of teaching, we as teachers must be prepared
to test the knowledge we hope the students will learn, in ways other than
traditional tests and quizzes. This is the basic idea behind alternative
assessment. With alternative assessment, the teacher is able to find
new and different ways of testing students, both before and after a given
unit. Some examples of alternative assessment might be a group presentation
about a topic, a diorama displaying the information learned, or perhaps
even a lesson designed by the students to teach the rest of the class something
they have learned. All of these would be good ideas for post assessment
of a unit.
The idea
of pre assessment is also an important one. With a pre assessment
the teacher can find out how much the students already know and just how
much emphasis he or she should put on different topics in the unit.
It is also possible to use alternative assessment in the pre assessment,
and in my unit about the Solar System I did just that.
I wanted
to find out what the students already knew about the Solar System, and
also what they wanted to know. I figured that if the students actually
wanted to know certain things they would learn them better than facts and
figures they found boring and uninteresting. In order to accomplish
this goal, I gave each student a worksheet entitled "Raising
Questions." On this worksheet, students were asked to write three
questions they had about the Solar System or space. By doing this,
they were expressing to me not only what they wanted to know, but also
what they already knew. They were showing me, by using certain terms
and asking different levels of questions, how much they already knew about
the Solar System and space.
The ideal
situation would have called for me to cater the entire unit to these questions
and make sure each one was answered in turn. But this is not an ideal
world we live in, so this was quite difficult to do. After reviewing
the questions I did decide that the activity planned for the unit, "The
Great Solar System Rescue" CD-ROM, was still appropriate, but I wanted
to do more than that. So, I decided I would choose some of the questions
that were asked and answer them for the students. The problem now
became, how do I get these answers to the students and still not lose class
time. The answer came in the form of a bulletin board. I took
about fifteen of the questions and typed them up, along with answers.
Then I fastened them to the bulletin board in such a way as the student
had to read the question and then flip it up to see the answer. I
also took this opportunity to add an additional question to the end of
the answer to give them something more to think about.
This "Raising
Questions" worksheet started out as simply a form of alternative pre assessment
and turned into a much larger project. In this instance we can see
how sometimes what we plan in teaching can lead to new and unexpected opportunities
we had not foreseen. For this reason it is important to continue
not only with new forms of assessment, but also with new ways of teaching
and learning ourselves.