Documenting Preservice Teacher Growth through Critical Assessment of Online Lesson Plans

This research explores the question of how students in a social studies methods course improve skills in analyzing and critiquing pre-existing lesson plans. It utilizes a pre-post authentic assessment tool to measure student growth in key skills of lesson plan critique over the course of one semester's methods instruction. The results support the finding that training preservice teachers in becoming critical consumers of online lesson plans and prepared materials is worthy of focus in methods courses.