Today I gave my students a self-grading quiz using Google Forms. I wanted to see how well they understood the day’s aim, which was for students to be able to identify character motivation. The lesson was fairly straightforward. First, I introduced the concept of character motivation through a class discussion. We decided that a good definition for character motivation would be ‘why characters do the things they do.’ To practice, I asked students to find actions that the main character, Gilberto, took in the novel, The boy from Planet Nowhere and describe in writing what might have motivated him to take such actions. This part of the lesson went great, or so I thought.
After we read a chapter from The boy from Planet Nowhere the students took the self-grading quiz I had prepared for them. Sadly the class average was a 59%. As I looked over the results I became frustrated. How could such a great lesson yield such sub-par results?
Later, I had a moment to really look at the data. I noticed that question number 7 in particular did a good job of concretely testing student understanding of character motivation. It reads, “Which statement best describes why Gilberto signed up for drama class?” That is taken directly off a past ELA test. Two questions were not entirely related to the day’s objective and one question had a wording issue in the answer that may have negatively skewed the results. The good news is that 77% of the class answered question 7 correctly.
The lesson I’m going to draw from my classroom today is to plan assessments carefully. Today my assessment did not entirely measure my objective. I ended up with terrible quiz grades and a sinking feeling in my stomach that I am not as effective of a classroom teacher as I believed myself to be. In the future I will make sure all of my questions match my teaching points precisely. I will also be more careful when wording questions and answer choices.
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