Prior Instruction
You may give a pre-teaching assessment to determine where your students are in relation to your lesson. You can make use of a written pre-test, the KWL technique, or by simply asking them some questions to diagnose your students’ entry knowledge and skills. Research found that “teachers in schools with high achievement rates use pre-assessments to support targeted teaching of skills. important to learn for standardized tests, as well as to group students for re-teaching.
During Instruction
There are many ways by which learning can be assessed in the process of teaching. We can immediately find out if our pupils/students can follow the lesson by posing oral questions or by observing them as they perform classroom activities or exercises. Giving a quiz is the most popular. Right there and then with their answers, with their quiz scores, and with the way they conduct themselves in class activities, we already sense whether we are already near or far from the attainment of our objectives. When we engage ourselves in this evaluation activity in the process of our teaching, we are engaged in what we call formative evaluation.
To conduct formative evaluation is beneficial to learning. If in the process of teaching we already get to know that re-medial teaching in some sub-skills if necessary, then we can do remedial teaching at once without having to wait for the result of summative evaluation. If we wait until the end of the semester to check on the status of pupils’ learning, it may be quite late because we have already wasted time and energy pounding on the heads of our students/pupils without knowing that their inability to learn was perhaps due to lack of mastery of pre-requisite skills.
After Instruction
After you spent an hour or less teaching, you would like to find out proof of learning. You will do a formative evaluation. If you gave a pre-test prior to instruction, then you give a post-test after instruction. If you used the KWL technique, then go back to it and ask your students to share what they learned (L). If you discover that your lesson objectives were not achieved, find out why and employ remedial measures like re-teaching, peer tutoring, and the like.