Project Assessment Tool for Year-Long Service Learning Projects

When your gifted students report monthly on their service learning projects, then you can also use a project assessment tool to track how they are doing with certain skills and with meeting objectives. For example, if their service learning project is starting a recycling program at your school, then some of the skills or objectives that you would assess could be: writing a persuasive letter/speech to school officials, using research methods to find out about other school's recycling programs, and learning about community recycling programs. Each gifted students' service learning project will be different, so each monthly assessment tool will also be different.

To make it easier for you to assess the students in your gifted program monthly, create a fill-in-the-blank project assessment tool for students that looks similar to this:

Name of student:

Year-long service learning project:

3 Skills/Objectives worked on this month during the project (1--exceeded expectations, 3--met objective, 5--failed to meet objective):

Comments on project, goals for next month:

Save each monthly project assessment tool in a separate file folder for each gifted student. Then when it comes time to do the end-of-the-year assessment, you will have all the information you need to fill out the assessment tool.

At the conclusion of the year-long service learning project, you will assess each of your gifted students, and they should also reflect and assess themselves. Although you may not have to give grades in your gifted program, it is still important to use a project assessment tool, so students can learn and improve for future projects. Again, use your monthly assessments to fill out the end-of-the-year report:

Name of Gifted Student:

Year-long service learning project:

A list of skills and objectives met during the project:

A list of skills and objectives to work on for next year:

Successes with the project (This section of the project assessment tool would be for the gifted teacher to comment on successful parts of the project such as: "Bob raised $250 to buy animals with Heifer International. He had a successful bake sale at the local grocery store every Saturday in October.")

Lessons learned: (This section would be for the teacher to gently comment on any thing the student tried that was not successful. For example, if the student tried to set up a recycling program for the whole school, but he was overwhelmed with the amount of paper to recycle, the teacher could say: "Joey had a great idea to recycle paper in the school. Next year if we try this again, we should find a larger room for the paper.)

Gifted and talented students should receive assessments on projects they complete throughout the year even if it is a service learning project and they will not receive a grade.