Study Curve

Although not specifically designed for Chemistry, the NSTA Press has recently published two excellent books titled "Uncovering Student Ideas in Science - 25 Formative Assessment Probes" Vols 1 & 2. If you are a member of the National Science Teachers Association, you can get them for a discount. For more information on Vol 2 (there's also a link on the page to Vol 1), check out http://www.nsta.org/store/product_detail.aspx?id=10.2505/9780873552738

Cheers

I'm just on the way out the door, but wanted to send off an initial answer. One of the things that took me a long time to accept is the importance of determining just one or two specific teaching points to monitor during a lesson and focus on just those as you gather/monitor student learning. It is so tempting to look for evidence of everything, especially those teaching points you may have been working on yesterday, the day before yesterday or even last month, when you are looking for everything you are not doing a good job of gathering evidence that will be helpful in informing your current instruction.

Utilizing warm-up questions at the start of the class is a valuable way to gather data about student learning. One of the science teachers I work with calls them WUA's (Wooas) and the students love them. He asks a question that requires the students to share their understanding/perceptions about what it is they are currently learning. With this information he is able to plan for whole group and small group instruction.

I'm just on the way out the door, but wanted to send of an initial answer. One of the things that took me a long time to accept is the importance of determining just one or two specific teaching points to monitor during a lesson and focus on just those as you gather/monitor student learning. It is so tempting to look for evidence of everything, especially those teaching points you may have been working on yesterday, the day before yesterday or even last month, when you are looking for everything you are not doing a good job of gathering evidence that will be helpful in informing your current instruction.

Utilizing warm-up questions at the start of the class is a valuable way to gather data about student learning. One of the science teachers I work with calls them WUA's (Wooas) and the students love them. He asks a question that requires the students to share their understanding/perceptions about what it is they are currently learning. With this information he is able to plan for whole group and small group instruction.

Just some advice on using this site. You need to use more tags so that the question is distributed to the correct people. For example you could put teacher, education, etc...as I know there are lots of teachers on the site. I hope this helps!