Formative Assessments

For the assignment that this blog post completes, I will be designing 3 formative assessments for a learning objective I created from the standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.4.

The objective:
Students will be able to write an essay that makes an effective analytical claim, using the author's word choice as evidence, about the author's tone or purpose in a grade-level text.

This objective culminates in a summative assessment--an essay that will become part of the students' grades, but I will use various formative assessments to check in on their progress as they go.

Since this is early in the school year, all students will be writing on the same text, in this case, Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and we will work together as a class to determine the author's tone and purpose, and to discuss anything that may be interesting about Frost's word choice.  This gives me an opportunity to assess before assessing, and confirm that the students understand what is required of them in the essay.

The first formative assessment I will use is a Do Now prompt that reviews the information from the previous day's class.  It asks the students to compare and contrast mood and tone in a brief paragraph.  Since this essay deals with tone, it will be important that students understand that it is a separate concept from mood.  Reading these paragraphs will give me a strong idea of what the students understand and don't understand about the concept of tone.  There may also be some red flags in the organization or mechanics of the paragraph that I can point out.

The second formative assessment will be our class discussion, which will give me plenty of informal opportunities to check in on students who are not volunteering lots of information, or to lead those who are volunteering false information onto the right path.  This is a very informal assessment, and requires lots of withitness from the teacher to get all the assessment information he needs.  Nonetheless, it is time effective and requires little preparation.

The third formative assessment, or rather set of formative assessments will be the writing process.  Students will turn in outlines and multiple drafts of the essay so that I can be sure they are on the right track throughout the process.  By the time they get to the graded essay, students will have had many opportunities, with detailed feedback, to rework and revise their efforts.