Chapter 9 Reading Response

Having students write a brief summary about what they already know about the topic is a way to gain understanding of a student's prior knowledge. You can also have a student fill out a KWL and can either have the students read them aloud to the class or have them hand it in to you and read them yourselves.

By establishing an anchor, it's easier to gain a sense of where each student is starting in the project and how much work they need to put in in order to reach their learning goals. Since, in a PBL based classroom, you have more opportunities to use different forms of instruction in order to help all types of learners be successful in the project.

One type of assessment that can be utilized is to simply ask the students what they learned. You could even videotape these mini interviews with the students in order to look back on them and see how each child differed. You could have them create something new at the end of the project as a whole as a way to summarize the entire project and what they learned while they were doing it. You could evaluate the work of the students using model real-world assessment, by applying the skills of professionals in a particular discipline.

This chapter was very useful to our project subject. Since our subject is history, it can sometimes be rather difficult to find ways to assess the students. This chapter provided ample examples of ways that we could assess our students in this particularly difficult subject.