We had a short assessment on Friday. The purpose was two-fold: first to see if the big ideas of why Europeans explored was catching on, and the second was to see if we were reading for smaller details (or merely taking in big picture stuff). The results were really interesting. Even though I can have conversations until I am blue in the face, some students will still rely on prior knowledge to answer questions. We can talk about how gold was used wanted by home countries because of its value as currency (and building up armies etc). Those are details from our text. But when we take the assessment the response is: "it was used for trade" or "it was used to buy stuff." The former is prior knowledge from 4th Grade and experience on the Oregon Trail (Social Studies is Native Americans, particularly those of the Northwest). The latter is vague, still prior knowledge, or possibly the connection of currency to spending. Neither work since they have little to do with the reading we did, and aren't really accurate in the 1400's.
In the big picture, we need to do some more thinking about how the explorers interacting with the native people (often but not always disease, slaves, acrimonious, etc). Those will come in the next section when we start comparing specific explorers, and looking at what it was that they did. But for now I know that we need some work re-reading. We'll do some work looking at questions for keywords, then reading to find particular pieces of information. After some demo/guided work, we'll work on it. The questions will work from minor details to thinking about that information in the bigger picture.
Is it a wholesale issue? Not necessarily. But we'll all work on it in order to slow down, be specific and clear in our responses, and hopefully make some improvement.
No comments:
Post a Comment