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From Bill Murdick:
 
        I will check out Ed Vavra's web site when I get through
this semester, but for the moment I cannot understand why
testing your own teaching methods is so complicated.
 
If you are asking elementary students to identify prepositional phrases
in passages (e.g. in the park; along with the others; via M Street;
to whoever is ready; besides you and anyone else similarly experienced),
then all you have to do is ask students to identify the
prepositional phrases in a passage at the beginning of the year,
and then see how many they can identify in that same passage
at the end of the school year.
 
(Of course, if you wanted to get scientific you would use two
passages in both sessions, half the students reading passage 1
at the beginning and 2 at the end, and half the students reading
passage 2 at the beginning and 1 at the end).
 
If the students can identify a significantly larger number in the
post-test, you have the beginning of a basis for claiming that the
students are learning the grammar. The next step would be to re-test
them at the beginning of the next year (after 3 months of vacation)
to see if the learning is retained.