Hopefully by now your students have watched the "Getting Started with Penda Science" student edition video and logged into their accounts to set up their avatars. Perhaps students have even completed an activity or two. Consider assigning a Penda assessment activity to get a snapshot of their current level of science standards mastery. Learn more about Penda's assessment activities here.


TRY THIS:

Assess learning gaps from previous grade-level
Assign the Penda assessment activity from the previous grade to uncover learning gaps. For example, if you are teaching grade 5 science this year, start by assigning the Penda Grade 4 Assessment Activity to your current grade 5 students. After students complete the assessment activity, run a line-item analysis report to identify standards from the previous grade-level that are in need of review and/or reteach. Understanding what standards per class, per group, or per individual student will help you more strategically plan lessons, especially if you know what gaps to anticipate prior to attempting to teach a standard. Additionally, once you know which standards need extra support, you can start to assign specific activities (per standard) to each individual student to address and fill in learning gaps. Learn more about Penda's line-item analysis reports here.


Assess prior knowledge - establish a baseline (pre assessment/diagnostic)
Another way to use Penda's assessment activities is to assign the current grade-level assessment to get baseline data for your students. For example, if you are teaching grade 5 science this year, assign the Penda Grade 5 Assessment Activity to your current grade 5 students. Once completed by students, the line-item analysis report will show which standards students may have prior knowledge or exposure to versus those that may be more troublesome, requiring more time or attention over the course of the academic year. This data will help you anticipate timing, as one could hypothesize standards with higher mastery scores may require less time because of prior knowledge or exposure, versus standards with lower mastery scores may require more time because students have not been exposed to or taught any component of the concept/topic. Learn more about Penda's line-item analysis reports here.