Becca Wilson

Assessment Plan #1 Comprehensive Unit Test

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2
Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its
development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and
is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary
of the text.

Concept Students Will Master:

Students will master how to effectively summarize and identify themes
of various texts.

Context:
This assessment is designed for 9th grade English I students at RS
Central High School. The class is made up of 16 girls and 14 boys. 5
students in the class are English Language Learners, who are bridging
according to WIDA* standards. The students dispositions are eager to
learn. This assessment has been designed to be completed within one
class period.
*WIDA Standards can be found at:
https://www.wida.us/standards/CAN_DOs/Booklet9-12.pdf

Reading Focus:
The focus of this assignment will be to allow students to show what
they know by answering comprehensive questions on paper with
ample time to reflect upon and answer the questions completely. This
will provide students who do not speak up or participate in class
discussions with an opportunity to formulate summaries of passages
and to show me that they grasp the concepts.

Instructional Strategies (What I will do/What students will do):

Prior to test: (in days preceding)
I will read a short story aloud to the whole class, while students
follow along in their books. Students will be instructed to take
notes when necessary, and I will model this behavior by thinking
aloud about what key themes or information may be important to
the story. I will point out connection between summaries and the
importance of citing the text when making assumptions. I will
also stop intermittently to discuss main ideas and gauge student
comprehension by asking questions about what is happening in
the text and what students can infer from the text that may not
been explicitly written.
 I will then ask students to write a summary of the short story
independently. I will ask for volunteers for examples of
summaries and give feedback. Next, I will model writing a
summary on the board. I will ask students to recall what
happened in the text, and to look back on their notes and in their
personal summaries for guidance. Students will also be asked to
verbally cite where in the story their piece of the summary came
from. After being able to write summaries on their own, students
who are English Language Learners will have had time to
formulate their own answers before-hand, therefore allowing
them wait time before being asked to answer in front of the
classroom.
Introducing students to literary terminology and modeling their
use as the reading and summarizing progresses will integrate
vocabulary into this activity.
Since the assessment is a test, the above steps will be repeated
several times over the course of a week to allow practice and for
students to use peer and teacher provided feedback to polish
their summary writing abilities.
Test day:
The short answer portion of the test will be questions about the
main ideas and themes of short stories we read and discussed as
a class. Students will be given the name of the short story each
particular question pertains to.
For the essay portion of the assessment, students will be asked
to read a short story that has been printed and given to them so
that they may annotate the text as they have practiced doing.
Essay questions will be comprehensive and ask students to
summarize the given text and identify the theme while showing
textual evidence from the story.

Assignment Sheet or Materials Needed:

Teacher provides: printed copy of test and any passages student may
need.
Student provides: paper, pencil

Assessment Tools (Rubric):

To assess this assignment, I will grade the correctness of the short
answers, looking for indications that students know the content and
can transcribe events in their own words. For the essay portion of the
assignment, I will grade for: grammatical correctness, completeness of
thoughts, and whether or not students were able to effectively use
textual references to back up their ideas.

Supporting Research:
This lesson plan was written with bridging English Language Learners
in mind. The research base for this assessment plan comes from
English Learners Academic Literacy and Thinking by Pauline Gibbons.
This textbook covers methods of teaching English to speakers of other
languages. Gibbons asserts that wait time is essential to English
learners for a multitude of reasons. This lesson allows for wait time
during the preceding lessons by giving students time to formulate their
own summaries independently. This allows the student to set their own
pace, and become more comfortable to join in classroom discussion
freely because they have been given ample time to come up with a
great answer.
Gibbons, Pauline. English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking:
Learning in the Challenge Zone. Portsmouth, N.H: Heinemann,
2009. Print.