1.) One way to determine the prior knowledge of what your students know is through assessment. Assessment can be very helpful in times that a teacher needs to know exactly what her students know. Sometimes you need to assess your students before beginning a project to ensure that they are prepared to handle the new task. We don't want to assign projects in situations where the students are not prepared to handle the work and because of this we can assess them beforehand to guarantee their readiness. Assessment does not mean that you have to give your students a common multiple choice test, instead you can assess them using different strategies, sometimes a simple group discussion will get the job done. Types of assessment will vary depending on what the specific teacher is hoping to learn about her students through the assessment.
2.) Using "anchors" such as KWL charts are a great resource to use when you want to track where your students are starting and how far they've come to reach their learning goals. Not all students will start at the same place, so it is important to realize that not all students will end at the same place either. As a teacher it is important to remind ourselves that we are looking at the overall development for each student and the progress they have made individually. Using anchors is the best way to track this information that when it comes time for assessment you are aware of where all the students began and all the students left off.
3.) There are many different ways to track what your students learned during their project and the best way to do it is by offering many different styles of assessment. Not all students learn the same so it would be unfair to grade them on what they took from the project the same way. In this chapter, Paul Curtis talked about how he developed a new system of grading that tracked a lot more than the traditional grading scale would. Instead of giving the students one flat grade he analyzed their capabilities on several different letters. Instead of saying "David gets a D because he didn't write the paper on the book," Curtis would say "David might deserve a D for not writing the paper, but he did a spectacular job on his podcast". This type of assessment shows that there are many different levels to a students understanding about what they've learned. Ideas like this are what help us as teachers to come to recognize that we need work on creating multiple different ideas for tracking our students progress.
4.) The information in this chapter is directly related to what we are doing in class because it shows us how we need to design the assessment on which we are grading our students on. We want learn how to recognize the progress of the students in our class, but it also gets us thinking about how we plan to grade our students on their final end project. My group has our class presenting a weather broadcast and it is important that we take into consideration the different elements that are going to be in the grading process and how effective our assessment is.
You have some very well thought-out responses! I like that you went into detail and gave a couple examples of different assessments that can be done when trying to determine a student's prior-knowledge. Almost every other post I read only mentioned the KWL charts, but yours a lot more descriptive and applicable. You did mention KWL charts in your response to questions #2, and gave a great example of when and how to use them. Your response to question #3 was enjoyable to read because you used some direct quotes from the book, bringing in a real-life situation of a teacher assessing his students. Great responses!
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