Beginning of the Year Assessments with Google Forms

The first week is always a time of optimism. The first week at my school was full of opportunities for my new students. The first week with a new teacher is an opportunity to leave the past behind and start fresh. My students seemed to come to their new Spanish class in three distinct groups: Fearless, Scared, and Resigned. My goal for this year is to bring them all to the group "Capable and Confident". However, before we can start, I wanted to assess the students abilities.

Too often in the past I have assumed I knew students' levels and just worked on problem areas as they came up. I have resisted beginning of the year assessments because I have been afraid that students would be dejected if they felt they didn't know everything that I asked. I was afraid I would lose some students before we even started because they felt stupid.  But, since many of my colleagues have been using some type of beginning of the year assessment, I thought it was time to put my worries aside and try it.

Since we have better access to computers this year, I created an online "Intro Assessment" for each of my levels using a Google Form set up as a quiz so I could have it quickly and automatically graded. I loved that the Google Form gathered all of the responses together so I could look at student answers all together to see if their answers were a pattern of things that none of them learned, or if it was just a few students that needed review.

Although a quick written assessment isn't a total insight into students' abilities, I thought it was a good place to start. I didn't give the students in Spanish 2 the ability to see their scores, but I did let the Spanish 3 students see their results.

For Spanish 2, there was some simple translation, vocabulary, and basic questions that students should be able to answer at the beginning of 2. In looking at the results, I could quickly see that we have a lot to do. Students seem to have some basic vocabulary, but struggled answering questions, even simple ones like "Where are you from?" and "What is the weather?". In Spanish 3, it was all translation/answer the question for Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 topics. The Spanish 3 classes fared better and although the automatic grading still gave terrible scores, the majority of the students demonstrated a firm grasp of the Spanish 1 content and a passable grasp of Spanish 2.

I was glad that I didn't let Spanish 2 see their scores. I think that many of the students would have been very upset and lost confidence in their abilities, or it would have confirmed their worst fears. In Spanish 3, I think the ability to compare their answers with the correct answers I provided provided some insight in where they needed to focus their effort. Many of the Spanish 3 students realized that they had made silly mistakes, and some asked lots of great questions about why things were incorrect.

So, as I prepare for Week 2, I am armed with some knowledge of the classes overall abilities as well as some individual struggles so I can help specific students one-on-one. I have adjusted some of my review activities to better focus on what students need to work on. I am looking forward to doing some more practice conversation activities to see how the students are able to communicate and then help them create some goals for their growth this year in both written and oral communication.