Alexander Charlick – Internship SLA

Introduction
An example of Student Learning from my Internship is demonstrated by my Student End of Trimester
Self-Assessment with my World History 11 Students; we had covered several topics/skills this trimester
and I wanted to get an idea about how confident my students felt about their content knowledge and
skills. I gave this Self-Assessment out the week before we had their Trimester Finals so I could then tailor
our review sessions/activities to areas they felt weak in.

Aligning to Learning Goals

The goal of the self-assessment is to review a whole trimester's worth of learning – it involves multiple
standards, including content standards (5.2-6.1), ranging from the Columbian Exchange to the French
Revolution. It also involves a wide variety of reading/writing skills (P1) such as thesis writing, short
answer questions, reading primary texts (Document Base Questions) and writing an argumentative
essay. The District I taught in also had its own separate standards that included Self-Assessment.
Collecting Data
At the end of a normal lesson, students were handed a ‘World History Self-Evaluation” which asked
students to rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 about how confident each student feels on a number of
skills/content areas we had covered over the Trimester. They were also asked what areas they felt very
confident in their understanding of, and what areas they felt confused by – so I could review that
content. They were also asked what activities they would find helpful for review, and what learning
activities in class they find most useful. The first section of the Self-Evaluation focuses on what they
need to prepare for the Trimester final and the second section focuses on how they learn and what
activities are helpful for them so I can change my lesson plans to reflect what helps them most. The
following are examples of the “World History Self-Evaluation”’
Example from “World History Self-Evaluation”
After all Students filled out their self-evaluation, I collected them all and began to look for patterns in
their reported data – specifically what are each class's strengths & weaknesses? What skills/content
needs to be reviewed & practiced? I then went and put together lesson plans for the next week that
targeted each class's weakness – afterwards I went and looked through student evaluation of different
activities and teaching methods to try and narrow down how to improve my own practice.
Data Analysis
So, for the sake of simplicity I’ll be limiting data to one class – my 4th hour 11 th Grade World History
class. The following represents the data collected from their self-evaluations.

Skill 1 2 3 4 5

Vocabulary 3 2 6 4 3
Multiple Choice 5 5 7
Questions

Writing (Overall) 1 4 2 6 2
Short Answer 1 6 2 6 2
Questions

Essay Questions 2 5 6 3 1
Thesis Writing 1 7 2 4 3

Compare/Contrast 2 2 4 5 3
Evidence Usage 2 4 7 3 2

Document Based 1 5 5 4 3
Questions

Content Topic 1 2 3 4 5

Protestant 2 4 4 5 2
Reformation
Colonial Empires 7 2 5 3

Scientific Revolution 2 3 2 9 2
Asian Empires 3 3 8 3

Enlightenment/Frenc 2 3 3 6 3
h Revolution

Data Highlighted

Green = Students feel confident in this area

Yellow = Students feel somewhat confident in this area

Red = Students do not feel confident in this area

Pink = Students are divided, some feel confident others do not

Examples of Student Self-Evaluations
Evaluating Student Learning
So, looking at the data collected we can put different skills/content areas into 4 different effectiveness
categories – Confident (Green), Somewhat Confident (Yellow), Not Confident (Red), and Divided
Confidence (Pink). Skills/content that students appear confident in is covered in the study guide and
briefly in classroom reviews, areas where students feel somewhat confident in will be covered in the
study guide and extensively in classroom review, and areas that are Not Confident/Divided Confident
are going to be covered extensively in both in class reviews and in specialized study guides. Key areas
where students seemed weakest were largely centered on Writing skills, specifically SAQs (Short Answer
Questions), Essay Questions and Thesis Writing. They seem confident about most of the content area
topics, except for the Colonial Empires. There was also a section of the Evaluation where students made
suggestions of what review activities would most benefit them.

Modifying Lesson Plans

So, I needed to construct a week of lesson plans that reviewed the key skills/content that students
didn’t feel confident on. So, I constructed two review guides, one that covers all the content and offers
two practice essays the other that asks for a series of practice short answer questions that reviews our
most recent unit (The Enlightenment & French Revolution). I provided time in class to work on both
study guides and I required students to complete them during class time so I could provide guidance in
SAQs and how to construct Essays/Practice Writing a Thesis.

Example from SAQ Study Guide

Example from Essay Practice Study Guide
In addition to the Study Guides/Skill Practices we had classroom content reviews, including a formal
lecture/discussion, and an online practice quiz that helped review basic vocabulary and concepts that
students indicated they felt confused about.

Assessing Learning Outcomes

Following the week of review activities, students completed their trimester final exams. These served to
provide summative data which helped me determine whether students had met the learning goals. In
particular, I wanted to look at the areas where students felt the weakest, namely, essay writing & short
answer questions. I’m going to compare student performance on their Trimester Summative to their
performance on an earlier Formative Assessment that evaluates the same skill. My school uses
Standards-based Grading which puts all grades on a 4-point scale.

4 – Above Standard; Students that exceed State Standards for 11 th Grade Social Studies

3 – At Standard; Students that meet State Standards for 11 th Grade Social Studies

2 – Approaching Standard; Students that do not meet State standards but are showing clear progress
towards the standards

1 – Students that do not approach the state standard

In the following graphs we can compare student performance on an earlier formative assessment of
their ability to write a historical essay to their performance on the essay portion of the Summative.
Scores produced by Formative Essay Quiz

Scores produced by the Summative assessment (Essay section)

Reflection
Based on data collected, students began concentrated in the 2 score, approaching the standard; after
instruction, practice, and review, students diverged either towards the Standard or away from it.
Number of students performing at standard increased by 1/3 rd while students scoring a 1 increased by
½. It should be noted that the summative assessment occurred after it had been announced that school
would be suspended on account of COVID-19 social distancing policies and it was at the end of the half-
day. The reason I bring this up is that students who in the past had put more effort into their
assessments, this time got lower scores and clearly showed less effort in their essay. Students may have
seen this as an excuse to put less effort into their assessments.
Conclusion
Formative Assessment is a vital tool to inform instruction techniques and learning gaps; without them,
teachers are unable to determine what skills/content students need to practice more and self-
assessment can be an excellent way for students to engage critically with their own learning process –
what works for them and what doesn’t. My interventions and review plans may have been helpful for
some students to reach the state standard; however, given the unique circumstances around data
collection, definitive conclusions about efficacy are difficult to reach. However without
review/intervention, learning outcomes likely would’ve been worse in addition to the other data I
gathered from the self-assessment namely what activities students find useful also can help inform
future instruction.