Assignment 3A

Assignment 3A

For the field experience assignment, I chose a group of basketball players in the program I coach at.  Because some of the skills that I am transferring over from assignment 2A, I went with a group of freshman as some of them are not quite developed enough yet, that these drills would still be challenging for them.  If I chose the team I coached, it may not go so well as they are extremely advanced and proficient in comparison to the drills I used for the field experience.  For the assignment, I used a total of 6 freshman girls.  Five of the girls are 14, and one of the girls is 15.  I will call the students Student A, Student B, etc. in my findings. 

            After explaining my purpose to the students, they were all excited and eager to help me out and fulfill this portion of the course.  I explained that this would be just as if it was a classroom setting, not a practice one, and so I would go through the procedures as if we were participating in a classroom as opposed to a practice.  They understood, and changed my name from Coach to Mr. Nunemaker for the rest of the day. 

            I chose to do the “Tuesday” portion of my unit plan.  This lesson revolved around having students use their “weak” or off hands to dribble a basketball.  The previous lesson had the students practicing using their strong or dominant hands to practice dribbling a basketball.  Because the students I have are actually in basketball, they are all quite proficient with using their strong hand, but again I purposefully chose this freshman group because many, if not all of them struggle with using their less dominant hand.  The lesson begins with a review of the previous lesson’s work, so I began my lesson connecting the two and having the students practice using their dominant hand.  I wanted to do everything exactly as I had described I would in my unit plan up and through the pre assessment, so I gave instruction as I had planned and had the students participate in the same activities that they would as if they were going to go through the entire lesson. 

            For the pre-assessment in this lesson, the students are supposed to use their weaker hand to dribble the full length of the basketball court and back.  I was to time each student as well as record how many times they lost control of the ball.  For the pre-assessment protion, the students were not given any instruction and were allowed to attempt this skill on their own. The results are as follows:

Name	Time (Seconds)	# Amount of Times Lost Ball
Student 1	15.3	1
Student 2	14.1	1
Student 3	12.9	1
Student 4	16.0	2
Student 5	14.2	1
Student 6	13.1	1

            The pre-assessment drill I have designed is just okay.  I have a couple of issues with it.  First off, it is going to take way too long to get all the students to go through the pre assessment.  I had only 6 students and it took about 5 minutes from beginning to end.  I can only imagine how that is going to go with 50 students.  I won’t have very much time for instruction, formative assessment and summative assessments if I take this long to get the pre assessment done.  If I had a student aid, I could get it done in half the time and that would probably be okay.  But there is just no way I can have 50 students do this individually.  Also, I did not do a great job of describing what it means to “lose control of the ball”.   While I was observing the students, I had 2 of them semi lose control of the ball, but gather it back before it had rolled away from them.  Under my own scale, I had no idea whether to mark it as losing control or not, as in a sense they lost it for a split second, but never really had to change course.  I was flummoxed to say the least at what to do.  Also, I realized halfway through the pre-assessment, I did not account for something else.  The students are being measured against themselves the first time through.  Basically if they improve their time, they get a higher grade.  Also, if they lose the ball less times after instruction their grade also improves.  I did not take into account what would happen if the student performed at the same amount of time or if they lost the ball the same amount of times.  More importantly, after thinking it through I know there would be a few unscrupulous students that would purposefully perform poorly on the pre assessment, and then improve their performance post instruction to guarantee a higher grade.

            As a result of this, I would make a couple of changes to my rubric.  I would need to determine what a student at this age group should be able to do post instruction and compare them against that time.  I probably will also probably just have to eliminate how many times a student loses the ball from the assessment at all.  First off it is too difficult to determine if a student loses full control of the ball or not, and students could easily manipulate the results to achieve a higher score.  Lastly, I would cut the time that I actually measure them in half.  I feel if I only measured the students going one way up the court, I will have much more time for both instruction and the upcoming formative and summative assessments which will conclude the lesson.