I love the thinking behind Illustrative Mathematics’ Pre-Unit Assessments: The questions assess kids’ understanding of the most relevant standards from previous grade levels. The results let teachers know what support kids might need (individually and as a class) to access grade level work.t There are even tips for when to address gaps/misconceptions on the IM Assessment teacher guides. (You will need a free educator account in order to access the assessments on the Kendall Hunt website.)

I believe that assessing prior knowledge is truly an equity issue – check out Chapter 5 (Assess, Activate, and Build on Prior Knowledge) of Choosing to See by Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown for more about this! These pre-assessments are just one way to gather information about students funds of knowledge before the start of a unit.

I’m creating Desmos activities with the Version B Pre-unit Assessments in the hope that the automated grading of the multiple-choice questions and the sorting of questions will make it much more efficient for teachers to analyze and use the pre-assessment data.

6th Grade:

Unit 1 Pre-Unit Assessment: Area and Surface Area

Unit 2 Pre-Unit Assessment: Introducing Ratios

7th Grade:

Unit 1 Pre-Unit Assessment: Scaled Copies and Scale Drawings

Unit 2 Pre-Unit Assessment: Introducing Proportional Relationships

8th Grade:

Unit 1 Pre-Unit Assessment: Rigid Transformations and Congruence

Unit 2 Pre-Unit Assessment: Dilations, Similarity, and Introducing Slope

Please reach out with any tips or ideas for improving these.