Creating Pre and Post Tests

For the my fieldwork my group had to create both a pre-test and a post test for the fifth grade class. This was new to me  In other methods classes we assessed students, but did not create a document for the class as a whole.  The creation of the pre-test differed from creating the post test.  The first one was mostly about finding out what the students already knew about the topics you were going to teach.  The questions we came up with were vague for the most part.  For example, we knew we were going to talk about colonists and Native American, therefore one of our questions was about where they thought the colonists were from, another was about who lived on the land.  As for the post test, we were more concerned with assessing how well the students understand the material we taught them.  With this being said, the questions we put on the post test were more specific.  They dealt with names of places or people that we talked about in our lessons.  During the process of making both of these documents I tried to find the most important pieces of information from my portion of our lessons and make a question for it.  Our group wanted to make sure that we were assessing students on the information that was most important instead of picking random pieces of information and putting it on the tests.