I've been student teaching for a few weeks now, but I just experienced my first crisis! I was asked to draft a test to determine how prepared my students were for the upcoming semester. I based the questions on clearly defined state standards, worked on excellent multiple-choice answers and got an enthusiastic response from my mentor teacher. I passed the test out, waited for the students to finish and giddily anticipated grading my first real creation as a teacher.
The result: disaster!
My students scored an average of 27%, slightly higher than absolute guessing on every question. The test had completely failed to test anyone's prior knowledge, as they could have acheived the same result by marking each question "A."
Disheartened, I reasoned that the students were simply woefully prepared for the coming semester. After all, the teacher had thoroughly approved the test and I had no problem with any of the questions. To test this hypothesis, I gave a copy of the test to my girlfriend, a college graduate with a Biology degree from the University of Michigan. She proceeded to answer 33% of the questions correctly. It was only then that I realized that I had made a mistake that should have been obviously detected: I had assumed that the students' content knowledge matched my own. The next prior knowledge test I draft will feature a much wider range of difficulty in the questions in order to properly assess my students' knowledge.
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Wow. I don't know what I would have done in your position...I probably would have made a similar mistake. And this happened in September!? How have things gone since? While I can imagine that was a disheartening experience, it sounds like a valuable one...in MAC classes, we're always talking about the importance of recognizing students' prior knowledge, but I don't always think about how I would do that in a classroom.
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