The One-Question Pretest

Yes­ter­day I shared some thoughts about pretest­ing that were prompted by a year-​​old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-​​old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this arti­cle, she talks about how com­pre­hen­sion is not some­thing that can be con­tained in a dis­crete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongo­ing, recur­sive process of apply­ing those facts and skills to build a pic­ture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is some­thing like hand­ing the stu­dents a bird­house kit. The pieces are pre-​​measured and pre-​​cut, and every­thing we need is already there. We walk them all step-​​by-​​step through the assem­bly of the kit, focus­ing on their tech­nique in ham­mer­ing and glu­ing. It doesn’t mat­ter that some of the kids have designed and built their own bird­houses, and oth­ers haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the les­son, every­one in the class has an iden­ti­cal birdhouse–though per­haps we allow them to choose their own col­ors for the paint.

Rather than giv­ing a pretest that runs through all of the dis­crete skills in a unit (“explain how to ham­mer a nail with­out bend­ing it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), con­sider giv­ing your stu­dents a one-​​question pretest that gets at the most impor­tant aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a bird­house and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sam­ple One-​​Question Pretests that might work in var­i­ous sub­ject areas:

• Explain how Amer­ica became an inde­pen­dent country
• Pret­zels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 stu­dents in our school. Fig­ure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you com­puted the answer with­out a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a para­graph that con­vinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the begin­ning of this story and write what you think will hap­pen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get dis­crete data on what spe­cific skills and knowl­edge your stu­dents have, a care­ful read­ing and analy­sis of the stu­dents’ responses can give you a wealth of infor­ma­tion that would be immensely help­ful in plan­ning your instruc­tion. It wouldn’t take any more time than a tra­di­tional pretest. If you embed it into other activ­i­ties, such as includ­ing the pretest as a learn­ing cen­ter activ­ity that all stu­dents will com­plete over the course of a week dur­ing nor­mal rota­tions, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-​​Question Pretest idea to your own sub­ject and grade level?