Identifying your students’ achievement gap

Author: Arlene Vinion Dubion

In the last blog, I encouraged you to reflect upon the end of the academic year, writing down what worked, what didn’t work, and what could be improved upon. Before you put down that pencil, there is one more thing to be done that your future self will thank you for.

We all know about the summer slump and prepare for it. But this fall is likely to be different. The move to online learning was quick, and while we did all we could, not all students were prepared. You probably had a couple of students who were not fully engaged in remote learning for whatever reason, and it is likely that these are the same students to usually struggle in school. 

In April, more than one news outlet addressed the growing achievement gap likely to be caused the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent school closures. Time magazine cited the lack of technology and internet access, and challenges in supporting students with special needs. The Washington Post republished an article by Richard Rothstein discussing socioeconomic reasons for the achievement gap and why we will see this gap widen. If you prefer more cerebral information with graphs and data, NWEA research published a brief forecasting a larger than usual difference in math scores for students in grades 3-8 as caused by the Covid-19 crisis. Bottom line, we will likely encounter a much larger gap in knowledge among our various students this upcoming fall than we have in past years. 

“What can we as educators do? …Identify to what extent knowledge gaps exist among our various students.
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So, what can we as educators do to help bridge this increasing achievement gap being caused by the Covid-19 crisis? The first thing we need to do is identify to what extent knowledge gaps exist among our various students. For that, we can take the time now to plan for a pre-assessment to give our incoming students.

The purpose of a pre-assessment is to identify to what extent each student is ready to learn new content. A pre-assessment should NOT be the unit summative assessment. While it may be nice to see how much students have improved over a unit of study, it does not help to gauge where students currently are in their understanding of the content. Nor does it inform how instruction could be modified to help all students learn. Rather, a pre-assessment needs to address readiness to learn by measuring the prior knowledge a student must have. 

To write a pre-assessment, you first make a list of what students need to know to engage in the content they will be learning. For example, if you are teaching Algebra 2, your students need to know Algebra 1 content. It would also help if geometry students already knew how to calculate perimeter and area of simple shapes. Don’t make assumptions that your students already know content. Make sure they know the content they need by testing them. Use the question “What are the essential understandings I need my incoming students to have?” to help start your list.  

After you have your list, identify a couple of questions you can use to gauge whether or not incoming students have these essential understandings. Use some easy ones that will build student confidence and some challenging ones like those you would use for a unit summative assessment. You can write your own or pull from a good question bank. 

Doing these two things now, identifying essential understandings and writing a couple questions, will help you when the academic year starts. At that time, you can revisit your list and questions and create pre-assessments for your students. You can make one large one assessment or several small ones to go with different units. Regardless, figuring out where your students ARE will help you to get them where they need to be with their learning. 

Later in the summer, we will revisit this topic, providing more guidelines on how to write and administer a good pre-assessment for identifying each student’s readiness to learn. In the meantime, making a list and writing a few questions will give you a good starting point.

Knowing that there will be larger achievement gaps with our incoming students, take the time now to prepare your pre-assessment. Make a list to answer the question: “What are the essential understandings I need my incoming students to have?” Then identify a few questions to go with each understanding. Your future self with thank you. 

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