Remember years ago when the norm in schools was to administer a pretest before introducing a topic? We were told by administrators that establishing a baseline with a pretest, educators can better track and measure student growth in each of the knowledge standards. Ugh. As someone who doesn’t love taking or assigning written tests, this was difficult for me. I teach with a student centered approach and attempt to make as much of my health content skill based and engaging. A written pretest is not my jam.
I still give a “pretest” before diving into the fascinating topics we discuss in middle school and high school health. However, I now call them self inventories and have been designing some new templates to make this activity more engaging for students. For the past few years I have used a simple digital template that students could drag a checkmark to indicate what they know or already do related to the topic. More recently I have been staying away from digital work and trying to incorporate more paper and pencil worksheets. My new and improved self inventory template can be used digitally or via hard copy. The hard copy version is my personal favorite and requires colors; colored pencils, crayons, or markers will do.
Students simply assess their current understanding of a topic by creating a key and shading each question or prompt based on what they already know. As always, feel free to edit to best suit your content. I hope you find these templates helpful.
Links to the templates:
This microblog post was a featured post in #slowchathealth’s #microblogmonth event. You can search for all of the featured posts here. Please do follow each of the outstanding contributors on social media (including Shelby Hosmer, who teaches at Colton Pierrepont Central School and is the author of this post) and consider writing a microblog post of your own to be shared with the global audience of slowchathealth.com
Pair this blog post with the following:
Three Ways to Accelerate Assessment by Jennifer Mead
Assessment: Updating and Improving by Matthew Bassett
Assessment – Let’s Change the Stigma by Amy Falls
Have you read the latest Book of the Month recommendation?
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