Assessments Written by Others
Common Core Success Assessments, by EL Education
The most useful assessments that I can include in this portfolio are the ones written by the authors of the curriculum that I must teach in my ELA classes during student teaching. Hartford, CT adopted the EL Education Common Core Success Curriculum for use in its school's ELA instruction. Therefore, I must follow the included scripted lessons for instruction and use the included assessments to assess my sixth grader's learning.
It is important that I analyze the validity and reliability of these assessments to ensure I am assessing my students in the fairest way possible. Even though they are distributed through a company and not personally written, mistakes do happen. Assessments are such a critical aspect of student's academic experience it is important not to skip this routine of assessing assessments.
I will begin student teaching in February, which is when the students will be on unit 1 of module 2A, during this unit I will use the curriculum's mid-unit assessment to formatively assess my students. This assesses student comprehension of figurative language and uses the assigned text, Bud, Not Buddy. They must apply their analytical skills to answer constructed-response items that ask them to interpret figurative language, tone and meaning in a pre-selected passage of the novel.
The end-of-unit assessment, which I will use as a summative assessment, asks students to apply the knowledge and skills gained through the unit on figurative language and the chapters read of Bud, Not Buddy to a different form of text. They will be asked to read a passage from President Barack Obama's Back-to-School Speech and use their analytical skills yet again. However, they will be looking for the central idea of the speech, the main idea of a selected paragraph, and meaning of individual phrases. This scaffolded assessment touches on prior knowledge from past units and modules, which makes it a cumulative assessment.
The blue links above will bring you to written descriptions of the assessments, however the actual paper assessments themselves and their materials are located in the Common Core Success ELA Workbooks that my students use to complete their ELA work in. This workbook is aligned directly with the curriculum and contains all of the formative and summative assessments I must administer.
It is important that I analyze the validity and reliability of these assessments to ensure I am assessing my students in the fairest way possible. Even though they are distributed through a company and not personally written, mistakes do happen. Assessments are such a critical aspect of student's academic experience it is important not to skip this routine of assessing assessments.
I will begin student teaching in February, which is when the students will be on unit 1 of module 2A, during this unit I will use the curriculum's mid-unit assessment to formatively assess my students. This assesses student comprehension of figurative language and uses the assigned text, Bud, Not Buddy. They must apply their analytical skills to answer constructed-response items that ask them to interpret figurative language, tone and meaning in a pre-selected passage of the novel.
The end-of-unit assessment, which I will use as a summative assessment, asks students to apply the knowledge and skills gained through the unit on figurative language and the chapters read of Bud, Not Buddy to a different form of text. They will be asked to read a passage from President Barack Obama's Back-to-School Speech and use their analytical skills yet again. However, they will be looking for the central idea of the speech, the main idea of a selected paragraph, and meaning of individual phrases. This scaffolded assessment touches on prior knowledge from past units and modules, which makes it a cumulative assessment.
The blue links above will bring you to written descriptions of the assessments, however the actual paper assessments themselves and their materials are located in the Common Core Success ELA Workbooks that my students use to complete their ELA work in. This workbook is aligned directly with the curriculum and contains all of the formative and summative assessments I must administer.