Standards-based Assessments

As a district, we are moving towards std-based assessments, as are a lot of districts... This month, I have been working really hard on trying to create an assessment to prove that my kids are learning. I think that we, as TPRS teachers, really feel a lot of pressure prove that we're not just singing and telling silly stories, but preparing our students to communicate in the TL. I know that I have felt that pressure lately, times one hundred, due to some teachers in the upper levels who haven't been the most supportive of me.

With that in mind, I set out to prove that my students can meet our district French standards. The first problem? We don't really have any district standards for French. When we got together to write them a few years back, we were told to use the National and State standards as our guide. So our standards look really, really vague. So I thought...and I thought...and I thought. What have I been teaching my students these last 3 months? What should they know after sitting in my class all those hours? Well, for my first years, that was pretty easy, I guess. We've been circling with their cards, so they have a TON of vocabulary dealing with activities. So I made a sort of list of the vocab I think they should know at this point. They all fit into the category of discussing activities, so I made that my "theme" under the standard of comprehension.

The next step was to create an assessment that would easily tell me if students are meeting my objective, falling below it, or going way beyond what I've taught or expect them to know. So I took 25 of the vocab words from my list and made a matching section, asking them to match the French to the English. I called this my basic knowledge level. If they can do this, I know they've "got" the information. Next, I asked them to apply this knowledge by reading a short story I wrote, using the words, and answering English questions in English about the story. I had some trouble when grading this part, because I realized that some of the questions were way to easy. Asking if science class was fun or boring really only required them to recognize the word for boring...which they already did if they completed the first section correctly. So I had to throw some questions out and stick with questions like "Why?" "How?" and such. In the last section, the above and beyond section, I had my students translate some new words, using context clues, background knowledge, and what they know about French. I had never taught these words and the students had never seen them before. I also asked them to make inferences about the characters and pick up grammar points, such as why there is an -e at the end of this particular word...etc. Things that I consider nice to know but not essential at this point in the year.

I've run out of time, so I'll have to blog later about giving the test and seeing the results!