Conveniently, while I was writing the explanations for the first part of this week's assignments, I happened to slightly cover what one would assess for the students. However, for the rare individual that may stumble upon this blog post in a vacuum, here is what I am doing:
We are creating assessments for objectives we have generated for standards based on our school districts. Since mine is a district that follows Common Core State Standards, and I wish to teach high-school English/Language Arts, my standard is this:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.9-10.3
Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
The objectives I created for this won't be posted here, however, the assessment ideas I had for the piece are below.
Formative:
There would be many formative assessments for the month-long unit that would be covering this standard, but for my purposes, I was thinking something along the line of a student check-up. What would happen is each student would bring in a piece of complicated or confusing language for the other students at their table to decipher, complete with a translation from whichever context of language the initial writing was in to something more simple. The students would trade, testing each other on something neither one would have prior knowledge of, then have a small conference where they discuss similarities, differences, and moments of confusion as they tried to translate. At the end of the day, students would turn in their snippet of language (a few sentences to a paragraph), their translation, and the translation they wrote for their partner's language snippet for assessment and review by me as the teacher. That way, they could keep practicing with real-world instances of language, and, if I saw common problems, I could give a refresher in the next class, or simply give them notes on what each individual wasn't quite understanding on their returned handouts.
For this particular assessment, they would have to do these once a week, but be given a time limit in class to translate, they would be able to work on what they don't know actively, grasping the ideas and concepts being given to them, the result would both fit the standard AND be helping them translate something they didn't know before, helping them in the real world, and since I would collect and correct the translations, I would be able to measure everyone's progress as the unit went on.
Summative:
The "final exam" of the course would be the summative assessment, and for this one, I had the perfect idea in the description of my final objective. Essentially, students would be required, on the last day of the class, to do a much larger version of the formative assessments. They would need to bring in a large legal document, technical instruction, academic paper... something at least 1 page long and written for a context that your "average" person wouldn't understand. They would also have to bring in a translation of the entire document's language into a different context (ideally something more understandable, but they could go from legalese to academic or sales-pitch, if they so choose).
If they didn't want to do that, from being sick of doing smaller versions of that or just more intrigued in the second option, they could write a letter to someone (a friend, a teacher, a doctor, etc) and then translate the contents of that letter into a formal document, a job resume, or a story to be told around a campfire... or any other contexts that weren't its original form.
Both of these options would be turned in (or presented, if the student wished and it was in a form the student could easily present) and, after a celebration for completing a section, we would move on to the next idea.
Both of these options would cover precisely what the standard is talking about, showing the translation, understanding, and creation (though this last one is more present in the second option) of language in multiple contexts. This would be a large project proposed, say, the week before it was due, giving them a firm time limit, and would be graded on quality of the overall translation (both faithfulness and ability to be understood). After all of the other work they had been doing, this would feel like, at most, a larger homework assignment that should be grasped by the students quite easily, but, by its very nature, helps them with real-world problems by helping them learn the proper etiquette for a cover letter, legal letter, or just helping them be motivated to learn how to understand legalese or see through sales-talk. It may be presumptuous of me, but this might just be a SMART idea.
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