3 objects

The official due date for Student Growth Objective proposals is not until the end of October for my district.  I submitted my proposal early and have started our pre-assessment activities without formal approval of the plan.  I am hopeful this will not come back to bite me.  I felt it was important to perform the pre-assessment as early as possible to get a true read on the student's ability levels - especially for the drawing section of the assessment.  

The drawing prompt is very simple - draw 3 objects / geometric forms from observation assuming the light is coming from the top left of the paper.  Each student was given a plastic bag of three wood shapes to draw from observation.  I am a bit surprised with the results thus far.  The range of understanding of this task is extremely diverse.  Several students traced the shapes and called it a day.  Other students drew the cubes as transparent forms, implying some knowledge of drawing a 3D shape but not applying that knowledge to an observation drawing task.  A number of students added some value to the image but ignored the direction of the light source completely, placing shadows differently for each object.  A very small number of students completed the task accurately and demonstrated impressive understanding of geometric form, value and directional light and attention to detail including the wood grain and texture in the drawing.  

Though the results are a bit frustrating - I envisioned the students existing knowledge was a bit more advanced - I guess the results are good.  Less than stellar results allows for a ton of growth during the year.  When this task is repeated in June I feel fairly confident the results will improve dramatically.  

The slide show is a sampling of the results from this pre-assessment drawing.  I apologize for the quality of the images.