Reflection #9

1. Description of a method of understanding of prior knowledge of students.

Something that you can do to get the prior knowledge of your student is to use an activity. Make it fun and interesting, because your students have already learned this material and hopefully they are well versed on it to do your activity. Another method is establishing anchors. By this you can gain an understanding of where your students are starting from and how far they go, as they work to meet learning goals.

2. Discussion on the importance of establishing anchors for a project.

The importance of establishing anchors is like I said before, to find where your students knowledge begins about a certain topic. This is also important because not all your students are starting in the same place, when it comes to all the different lessons they have learned. Also where each students goes in there journey through the project will be different for each student.

3.  Description of several ways to assess what students learned during the project.

A simple but sometimes overlooked method of assessing students is to ask them what they learned. You might be surprised at the answers you will get and how in depth they might be. At the end of  project you can have your students create something new that asks them to tell you about the project. If your students can take what they have learned and apply it in a different context can be a way to assess them. Another way to assess students work, which i thought was really cool was, a teacher brought in a panel of experts to judge her students final work. I thought this was an fun and interesting way to get students to really take their work seriously.


4. Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

This chapter is really informational about how to assess our students work in PBL. This is especially helpful to our group because we are having our students present their work to parents and other classes, so this gives us a few better ideas on how to grade them. I really like the idea of creating something new, to show what you have learned, I also like the idea of having your students enter a contest or submit their work for publication. I think having them be recognized for their own work is inspiring to them.