Pre-assessment for Differentiation

This unit is an introductory unit on grammar and basic parts of speech for third graders. Although they have had some exposure to grammar in the past, this unit asks them to take their knowledge further by digging deeper into grammar and asking students to apply what they have learned.

For a link to the pre-assessment for this unit, click here. I will use this pre-assessment to break students into groups based on their initial skill levels so that each student has a chance to grow as a learner.

For the purposes of this activity, I will break students into three groups based on hypothetical scores.

5 students who answered most, including the most difficult, of the pre-assessment questions correctly: These students exhibited knowledge beyond what was expected. In order to expand on their knowledge, they will be given a chance to play a computer game that gets progressively more difficult based on the questions the student answers correctly. This game is ever-expanding, so students will not run out of things to do. My school uses this game both as an assessment tool in and of itself and in the way that I plan to use it for this activity. In addition, at the end of this lesson, the students in this group will complete an exit slip detailing 3 things they learned, 2 things they want to know more about, and one big question they have.


12 students who have some knowledge about the topic as shown in their score, but need to develop higher order thinking skills: Although these students showed some knowledge of the topic, they missed some questions and therefore need more practice. To give them a chance to practice, the students were broken into small groups (2 students per group). Each group was given one to two topics to become experts on (nouns and plurals, verbs and adverbs, adjectives and superlatives/comparatives, conjunctions, subject-verb agreement, and pronouns). Once all of the groups had a chance to do research, students were slit into two groups, each of which had one member of each of the original pairs. The two new groups were each given 12 minutes to teach each other what they learned (2 minutes per person). When time elapsed, each group was given a passage and 10 minutes to correct as many mistakes as possible. When the time was up, whichever group had correctly fixed more mistakes got to have 15 minutes of computer time during quiet work time. In addition, at the end of this lesson, the students in this group will complete an exit slip detailing 3 things they learned, 2 things they want to know more about, and one big question they have.


5 students who appear to have limited knowledge about the topic: This group of students struggled with the pre-assessment. They came to the station at the back of the room to get additional instruction. Once students received the instruction, teacher gave students a preview of the next lesson (capitalization and punctuation, along with addressing envelopes and writing dates and times correctly) so that they could be the experts the next day in class. In addition, at the end of this lesson, the students in this group will complete an exit slip detailing 3 things they learned, 2 things they want to know more about, and one big question they have.

For a visual representation of this differentiation, please click here to see my MindMap.