Scenario: Let’s imagine you designed a formative assessment for an 8th-grade ELA class focused on the Common Core State Standard RL.8.3: Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.

1. Analyze Student Work Using the Student Achievement Partners (Green Sheet) Student Work Analysis Sheet:

You would take the student responses from your formative assessment and analyze them using the provided “Student Work Analysis” sheet. This involves looking for patterns in student understanding and identifying common strengths and weaknesses related to the learning target.

Hypothetical Example of Student Work Analysis (Elementary/Secondary Sheet – you’ll use the appropriate one):

Let’s say your formative assessment included a short excerpt from a play and asked students to:

• Identify a specific line of dialogue.
• Explain how that line propels the action of the play.
• Explain what that line reveals about the character speaking.

After reviewing several student responses, you might notice the following trends:

• Strength: Most students can identify a line of dialogue.
• Partial Understanding: Many students can identify what the line says but struggle to explain how it moves the plot forward.
• Weakness: A significant number of students provide superficial character descriptions based on the dialogue but don’t delve into deeper character traits revealed by the specific line in context.
• Misconception: Some students confuse “propelling the action” with simply summarizing what happened after the line was spoken.

You would document these observations and the number of students exhibiting each trend on the “Student Work Analysis” sheet. You would also note specific examples from student responses to illustrate these points.

2. Post Scores/Results to the Student Achievement Chart (SAC) and Complete Reflection Questions:

Next, you would transfer the overall performance levels of your students on this formative assessment to the “post-assessment” section of your Student Achievement Chart (SAC). This might involve assigning a simple score (e.g., out of 3 points for each part of the question) or categorizing students into performance levels (e.g., Not Yet Meeting Expectations, Approaching Expectations, Meeting Expectations, Exceeding Expectations) based on your analysis of their work.

Hypothetical Example of SAC (Post-Assessment Section):

| Student Name | RL.8.3: Analyze Dialogue/Incidents (Points Possible: 6) | Performance Level | Notes (Brief summary of strengths/weaknesses)

3. Analytic Summary of the Effectiveness of Your Formative Assessment:

Here is a potential analytic summary based on the hypothetical scenario above:

What evidence of progression toward ongoing content mastery or near mastery does your assessment provide (be sure to cite your work using the readings from the course)?

Based on the student work, there is limited evidence of progression toward ongoing content mastery or near mastery for the learning target (RL.8.3). While most students demonstrated a basic understanding of identifying dialogue, a significant portion struggled to articulate how that dialogue propelled the action or revealed deeper character aspects. This suggests that many students are at an initial stage of understanding the concept but haven’t yet reached a level of mastery where they can consistently apply this analytical skill.

According to Wiggins & McTighe (2005) in Understanding by Design, effective formative assessments should reveal the degree to which students are developing the targeted understandings and skills. In this case, the assessment highlighted a gap between identifying textual elements and analyzing their function within the text, indicating that ongoing instruction and further formative checks are necessary to support students in reaching mastery.

1. How do the results of your assessment offer a clear picture of the student’s progress toward mastery of the Learning Targets? What do they know/understand? What would you need to reteach? Give 3 examples.

The results offer a partial picture of student progress:

• What they know/understand: Most students understand the basic concept of dialogue within a text and can locate specific lines.
• What they struggle with (areas for reteaching):
  1. Propelling the Action: Many students could not explain how a specific line of dialogue directly caused a subsequent event in the plot. For example, when a character’s threat led to another character’s decision, students often just summarized the decision without linking it causally to the dialogue.
  2. Revealing Character Aspects (Beyond Surface Level): Students often identified a character trait mentioned in the dialogue but didn’t analyze how the specific word choice, tone, or context of the line revealed a deeper or more nuanced aspect of the character’s personality, motivations, or internal conflicts. For instance, if a sarcastic remark revealed underlying resentment, students might just say the character was “mean.”
  3. Distinguishing Cause and Effect vs. Sequence: Some students confused a line of dialogue that preceded an event with the line causing the event. They need more explicit instruction on identifying causal relationships in narrative.

2. What did you learn about creating formative assessments from this project? Cite at least 3 important insights.

1. Specificity is Key: The questions needed to be more specific in guiding students to analyze the how and why of the dialogue’s impact. A broader question like “Analyze this dialogue” was too open-ended and didn’t effectively target the specific elements of propelling action and revealing character. As Heritage (2007) argues in Formative Assessment: What Do Teachers Need to Know and Do?, effective formative assessment tasks clearly articulate the learning target and provide a focused lens for student response.
2. Providing Scaffolds for Complex Analysis: Students struggled with the abstract nature of “propelling the action” and “revealing character.” Future assessments should include more structured prompts or sentence starters to guide their analytical thinking. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development suggests that students learn best with support, and formative assessments can incorporate these scaffolds to help students access more complex thinking (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2007).
3. The Importance of Clear Success Criteria: The assessment lacked explicit criteria for what constituted a strong analysis of how dialogue propels action or reveals character. Providing students with a clear rubric or set of expectations beforehand would likely improve the quality and depth of their responses. Black and Wiliam (1998) in “Assessment and Classroom Learning” emphasize the crucial role of sharing learning goals and success criteria with students.