Description of a method of understanding prior-knowledge of students.

At the beginning of the project you identified to the students about the core concepts and processes that you want to reach.  You create rubrics or scoring guides that you make sure your students understand the goals they will be aiming for.  You want to aim for the criteria for measuring their success and make sure they know the criteria as well.  Throughout the project you will is a variety of formative assessments to check in on the students and their understandings and fine tune what they need to improve on.  

2    Discussion on the importance of establishing anchors for a project.

Establishing anchors for a project is important for you as a teacher because you gain a sense of where your students are starting and how far they are go to meet their learning goals.  This is important because you need to know where yours students started and how they are improving as the project goes on.  If they students are not improving or meeting the learning goals, it will be hard to continue with the project because you will be wasting your time but more importantly the student’s time.  You do not have much time with your students so you need to make very minute count.

Description of several ways to assess what students learned during the project.

There are several ways to assess what students learn during the project.  One way is to make sure that grades matter.  When you design your project, you have developed rubrics to measure progress toward key learning goals.  You need to know how to evaluate students work.  Another way is to ask students: what did you learn?  Interview your students at the end of the project to get their feedback.  They will be open and honest to tell you what they have learned during the project.  Another way to assess what the students learned during the project is to create something new.  Elect students to create something new that asks them to summarize or synthesize what they have learned. Modeling real-world assessments is another way to assess the students.  Since most of the projects you do with PBL is to apply the skills as if you were a professional, so you should assess them as a professional.  The last is to enter a contest or submit for publication.  When you tell students that you will be participating in something like a contest, they are more likely to do better and want to do their best. This is something that is very motivating for the students.

4       Discussion on how concepts in this chapter relate to your topic/project.

For our project we want to make sure that we check in with our students to make sure that the students understand what is going on.  Finding different ways to assess our students will give us options on which assessment would be best for our project.  We also want to establish anchors throughout our project to make sure that our students are understanding the project and the importance of it.