An Educational Adventure in Prague

As I talked about in my EDP blog, you can see that we have had a VERY busy week this week.  We’ve travelled to Italy, taught in a Czech elementary classroom, read many chapters in our textbooks, and even constructed and administered our own multiple choice test!
I feel like during this week, I have had the chance to use assessment on two different occasions. The first was during our lesson at the Czech elementary school.  Kayla, Sarah, and I learned that we would each have the chance to teach a mini-lesson to a English class in the third grade.  Based off our observations of the first grade class, we created lessons that we thought would be in the children’s’ ZPD. However, the children’s English language skills accelerated much faster than we anticipated and the children showed to be much more advanced. While we did not utilize any form of formal assessment, we were able to conduct informal assessments.  Throughout the lesson I paid attention to the children’s engagement and as we got further into the lesson the students proved to be more efficient at the material (verb usage).
Another form of assessment that I experienced was in a more formal setting.  Kayla and I were assigned a project in which we had to construct a multiple choice test and administer to at least fifteen people.  The test was to be designed for a elementary class in the Czech Republic (ergo, the material was culture specific).  The process of creating the test proved laborious, as Kayla and I researched our subjects and constantly revised our questions.  After we finished writing the tests we administered the tests to our other NC State study abroad classmates.  Not so surprisingly, most failed.  We analyzed their answers in depth, practicing computing things like item discrimination and item difficulty.  Overall, this project was very valuable- it showed me what skills I need to further develop and how significant content mismatch between instruction and assessment can really be.