Jen's Blog 2

A time that I have done an informal needs analysis was when I start a new math unit. I give a pretest before starting any unit. I identify the objectives that students seem to have a difficult time with. I look at the question. I try to determine why the students did not get this problem. Often I know that reason is simple formatting or exposure. I know students will get the skill once I have model those types of problems. Sometimes I know it is a skill that students just do not have and will struggle with. I think that my process most closely coincides with Rossett’s Five-Step Approach. The questions on the pre-test represent skills students should be able to complete by the end of the unit. This is determining the optimal performance. By giving the students the pretest I am able to examine how they approached the problem and any misconceptions they may have. I am determining their actual performance at that given time. I do not take in consideration the third step which is feelings. To me feelings are more a learner analysis piece. When I analyze the learner I want to know their interest and learning styles to make the instruction match them best. I do try to examine the causes. The common errors or knowing my students’ skills before the test indicate the cause to me. Last step is solutions. My question is the solution your instructions and how you approach it? That is how I interpret it in my classroom. Knowing my students, their misconceptions, and the skills needed I think about how I going to teach this unit. It seems to me that need analysis, task analysis, and learner analysis all overlap each other. To have the big picture you need to have all three. As I read the chapter one thing I wondered was is my objective, the voluntary state curriculum, or is my assessment my end goal. The assessment and the objective match but as I stated earlier often problems arise in formatting. First graders can verbalize more than they can write but we assess them in reading on their written responses. I find myself questioning do I want my students to able to summarize or write a summary. Is their written summary a writing goal or a reading goal? An example of task analysis I completed informally was when teaching place value. Students need to see 6 +7 = 13 is the same as 10 + 3 =13. This concept proved to be very difficult for my students. I broke the task down to showing teen number with ten sticks and one blocks. Then we used the maniplatives to show number equations. Then we moved on to exchanging ones for tens and extra ones. We would then show equations and exchange if necessary. I think that my step match most closely with Dick, Carey, and Carey. I thought about what they had to do at the end and backwards mapped. I also thought about subordinate skills they needed such as exchanging ones for ten sticks. As I have read through these chapters each time one particular approach seems to make more sense to me and seems to be more applicable to my classroom. I wonder if that is because they are the approaches that most resemble my own approach to creating my instruction. Is there one approach for each situation and each time I happen to be working with the same learners in the same environment?