• If none of the students know the content, then we provide whole-group instruction.
Activating Prior Knowledge
We often get the question, How are preassessments different from activating prior knowledge activities? They both activate students’ background knowledge on the topic at hand. They both get students focused on the current lesson. They both give you, the teachers, valuable information about where your students are with the learning targets. One difference is when you give the activity. It is a preassessment if you give it one to seven days before teaching the lesson. It gives you plenty of time to plan with the preassessment results in mind. If you use an activity to see what they know a couple of minutes before you teach it, that is considered activating prior knowledge. You don’t have much time to change your instruction, but it helps students make meaning and connections. Also, this powerful process promotes connections in the brain and improved memory.
Preassessments give the teacher a big advantage since there is time to change how he or she will teach the unit or lesson. Activating prior knowledge gives the students a big advantage since the neural networks are ready to make connections with the new learning. They are both excellent ways to prepare students for upcoming information, which can enhance the learning process, for both the teacher’s planning and the students’ learning (Shing & Brod, 2016).
Pre-Exposing
Pre-exposing students to content, or pre-exposure, is teaching bits of content and skills in advance—days, weeks, months, or even years before accountability. This tool, worth taking advantage of, is also known as building background knowledge, spiral curricula, or purposeful scaffolding. Some classroom examples follow.
• Attending on-site or mini field trips before the unit
• Visiting virtual museums before the lesson
• Preteaching vocabulary words and elaborating on them
• Providing realia or artifacts connected with the content
• Showing pictures or viewing video clips related to the topic
Providing students with rich instruction focused on the content they are reading, or are about to read, increases the likelihood that students’ comprehension will improve (Graves, 2006). Preteaching vocabulary supports comprehension, particularly for students who struggle academically (Fisher, Frey, & Pumpian, 2012).
Priming
Priming happens minutes—even seconds—before exposure to a learning event. Research shows that cognitive priming is worth the time (Wexler et al., 2016). The Wexler et al. (2016) study shows that a five-minute game just before mathematics or reading boosts comprehension on those curricular games, and that “doing three 20-minute brain training sessions per week for four months increased gains on school-administered math and reading achievement tests compared to control classes tested at the same times without intervening brain training.” Classroom priming examples follow.
• Sharing and discussing the daily learning target
• Using vocabulary words while speaking or discussing the learning
• Standing by a poster that reads brain alert when telling them something important
• Creating a standard web, or thinking map, showing all the learning targets, concepts, and products that they will encounter in the unit and referring to it every time you teach one of the targets.
Getting to know students this way to more effectively plan and instruct is not more work or a waste of time. All the techniques are easy to use.
What Strategies Can You Use?
Some common types of preassessments fall into two categories: (1) already designed and (2) teacher designed. Already-designed preassessments follow.
• Unit pretests or unit summative tests
• Benchmark tests
• Chapter questions
• Reading inventories
• Interest inventories
• Surveys for learning preferences and multiple intelligences
Teacher-designed preassessments follow.
• Student-led conferences
• K-W-L charts
• Entrance or exit tickets
• Essay, short answer, and journal responses
• Running records and anecdotal notes
• Anticipation guides
• Knowledge framing
We’re sure that you are familiar with many of the preassessments here. Most teachers have given students an interest inventory or multiple-intelligence survey; conducted conferences with students to determine their learning strengths and growth areas; and given students Donna M. Ogle’s (1986) K-W-L chart to complete (what I know; what I want to know; and what I learned). You’ve surely given students essay questions, short-answer questions, and journal responses to learn what they know about an upcoming standard; used running records taken during guided reading to plan the following day’s instruction; and added a question about an upcoming learning target to your daily exit ticket.
The strategies in this chapter offer even more choices. Like the others listed here, you’re not limited to using them during preassessment only. These strategies work for most formative assessments. Unit tests and chapter questions are often given after teaching—but think how much better you could plan and differentiate your lesson if you gave them before teaching. In fact, you could give many of the assessments in this chapter at different points in the lesson, but we’ll be examining them as preassessments that help you learn more about your students.
On the following pages, we will describe in more detail the teacher-designed preassessment strategies that you may not be as familiar with.
Create-a-Cloze
Create-a-cloze is a preassessment strategy for individual students. During create-a-cloze, students fill in the blanks with key terms. This will help you see what vocabulary and key concepts your students already know, and then you can omit them from your lesson.
Directions
Create or download a passage about the topic your students will be studying. Delete key words within this passage and create a separate list of these words so students have terms to choose from while trying to figure out which word goes in the blank.
Example
See figure 3.1 for an example of a create-a-cloze.
Suggestions for Differentiation
The following suggestions can help you differentiate this strategy.
• Bumping it up: Do not provide a word bank. Students must come up with the appropriate words on their own. Delete more challenging words from the passage.
• Breaking it down: Divide the text into paragraphs with a word bank for each paragraph. Present fewer blanks. Give students the first letter of the appropriate word.