Assessments

Subject: Reading

Grade: 5th

Classroom: Resource Center

Unit: Story Mapping and Cause and Effect

For my unit on The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney, I used a formative assessment and a summative assessment to track progress throughout the unit.

The summative assessment (on the left) was from the original scripted curriculum the students had been using for each weekly and monthly unit. The basic format is a story followed by 13 questions based on vocabulary, decoding and comprehension. For this unit, I used the story, vocabulary and comprehension questions but also added a set of events the students had to place in chronological order. Although, the overall idea of the unit was a success, I realized after that I should have reconstructed the assessment as well. The students had already had many failed experiences with this style of assessment, and since I taught my unit with so many visuals, I should have incorporated that into the assessment. For future use of this unit, I would reconstruct the summative assessment to have more visuals. First I would start with a story or excerpt from the book itself, perhaps part of the book the students hadn't read yet. Then, for the vocabulary questions, I would place pictures to represent the vocabulary and/or sentences where the students would have to pick which word best fits the picture and/or write the definition or a sentence using the word. For the comprehension questions, I would have set them up with pictures as well where the students would have to choose the cause or the effect of the event. Finally, for the chronological order piece, I would again have a set of pictures from the story they read for the assessment and have them place each in the correct order. With this style of assessment, the students would have been more successful since it would have matched the same style in which I taught the unit.

The formative assessment (on the right) is a daily check off chart I used to monitor daily progress through each lesson and activity accomplished. The key pieces of the unit are listed and for each activity I had the students complete, either as a class or independently, I would check off if they understood the concept, beginning to understand the concept, or are still struggling with the concept. This allowed me the opportunity to track daily progress and compare it with their final assessment. What I would make sure to do next time, is provide the students more opportunity to try each concept independently. Due to time restraints, a lot of the activities were completed as a class, and I feel that if I were able to give each student the chance to try the assignment on their own, I would have received more accurate results before the final assessment to make sure each of my students had a solid understanding of the key concepts.