Teacher-Made Tests

Last week I began a unit on Stone Fox, in which I used a variety of assessment techniques. When planning the unit, I was given the materials my host teacher had used in the past. Between all the various questions/worksheets/activities found in those materials, I decided to use parts of each of them to “create” my own sheets. My reviews included the use of context clues to understand the definition of vocabulary words, as well as a variety of questions with regards to the main events in the story, sequencing, inferring, and recalling details. After the first five chapters, they were given a vocabulary matching test.

Upon grading that test, I realized that I had made a mistake. I felt it was good to test their vocabulary, specifically, aside from their comprehension and ability to recall details. While the testing was not necessarily the problem, I couldn’t help but feel I’d made a mistake in creating my own test, rather than listening to their invented definitions. Looking back, I should have had the students agree on a definition for each word, writing that definition on the board, and possibly doing some classroom activities to help the students better grasp those concepts. Instead, I just used definitions from the classroom set of Merriam-Webster Elementary Dictionaries to create my matching tests. While it would be good for students to be able to relate the two definitions, this was not a consistent measurement of their learning for that book. While they were told not to use the dictionaries, that’s exactly what I did, and that wasn’t fair. Next time, I will keep this in mind when creating my own assessments.