The teacher must use various processes to regularly evaluate and analyze the students’ learning in order to determine progress toward goals and aid in instructional choices.
The teacher must know where each student is in his or her understanding of the content, both as a measure of attaining objectives and to identify where adaptations need to be made in the instruction. The use of a variety of assessment techniques increases the accuracy of the evaluations and accommodates the range of learners and learning styles in the classroom. Assessments are also important for providing feedback to students and can encourage the student’s personal goal setting for learning and development. Assessments are only valuable, though, if the teacher examines and analyzes the date received and uses it to identify the needs of each student and adapt instruction where it is needed. By offering a pretest for the MAUS graphic novel unit, I was able to determine where I should focus my instruction for the unit. Administering the same posttest after the unit showed me where the learning had occurred and where I should adapt lessons for future units. Reflection on assessment data and feedback before, during, and after the unit enabled me to address weaknesses and adapt the lessons as I went along.
PreTest Data and Reflection
Going into a graphic novel study, I knew that students would need to learn the specialized language associated with graphic novels so they could discuss the novel using language that everyone could understand. I knew from observations that some students read manga, a Japanese form of comics, but I did not know how widespread graphic novels or comics were among the other students. I needed to test their knowledge of graphic elements and some basic generalizations about graphic novels.
Immediately after the pretest, we had class discussions about graphic novels, the students’ experiences with them, and their attitudes about them. Some students who struggled with other prose works had an extensive knowledge of comics, while many students who normally excelled in class had little or no experience—and often had negative attitudes toward comics and graphic novels.
What the data told me was that this knowledge was not necessarily distributed equally among the struggling, average, or advanced learners. Both the college bound classes and the merged classes had similar high and low scores: 20 was the low score in each, while the high was 90 in the merged classes and 100 in the college bound classes. The average score for the college bound classes was 68, compared to the overall average of 64, and the average of the merged classes was 55. When I combined the data from the class discussion and the data from the pretest, I determined that I needed to offer a variety of methods to demonstrate the concepts across a wide range of knowledge, development levels, and learning differences.
Since the data showed that students had limited experience with interpreting graphic images, I decided to focus on the images more in the first few classes. I included direct instruction with PowerPoint slides to illustrate the important elements and designed focus activities to guide students through progressively more complex interpretations of images. After one of the pages, I added a video that described the construction of the page, panel by panel. Reflection on pre-unit assessments.
During-unit Assessments and Reflection
During the unit, multiple assessments were used to gauge student understanding. Besides the focus activities, study questions for each chapter were used to determine how well the students understood the characters, plot, and themes, and questioning and discussions during the readings highlighted background knowledge and students’ abilities to make connections with the text. The final product for the unit was assigned as a series of responses to each chapter so I could assess student comprehension as those were submitted. In addition, I conferenced individually with each student several times over the duration of the unit, so that I could see if they were struggling with anything and even redirect their efforts if needed.
Responses to the study questions showed me that many students were not following the story line, even after we read the chapters together. I added a PowerPoint presentation in the weekly folder that summarized the chapter and highlighted important points. Also, as we read, I started indicating the areas of the text that corresponded with the study questions. Reflection on during-unit assessments.
Post Unit Data and Reflection
After the MAUS unit was complete, I administered the same pretest to the students to determine the level of learning that had occurred. The post test results showed that most students achieved growth in understanding over the course of the unit. The low score in the merged SPED classes rose from 20 to 35 in one class and from 30 to 50 in the second, and the low score in the college bound classes remained steady at 45-50 in all four classes, rising from a 20 to a 45 in one of the classes. Overall, the average score increased from 64.0 to 75.2. The merged classes increased from 54.7 to 69.1, and the college bound classes rose from 68.1 to 82.4. In the pretest, 54% of the students scored above the mean. In the posttest, 75% of the students scored above the original pretest mean. In the merged classes, 83% of the students scored higher than the original pretest mean for merged classes, while 80% of the college bound classes tested higher than the original pretest mean.
While the data overall showed that students had a better understanding of the graphic novel terms, the data for the specific questions showed that there were areas where students consistently confused terms. It also told me that there were still misconceptions about the topics graphic novels could cover. In a future unit, these are areas that I can address through modifying my lessons, spending more time on significant differences between similar terms and adding more instruction about graphic novels in general. Reflection on post-unit assessments.