To prepare students for their summative Atlantic Essay, I created a series of formative assessments that target the same standards. This assessment comes after the Rhetoric Challenge Pretest and the Social Worker’s Report formative. The Social Worker’s Report apprenticed students through the tasks of identifying the author’s rhetorical choices and describing if they were effective in advancing a given purpose. For the Governor’s Budget Fiasco assessment, students complete a similar series of tasks but have the added objective of determining the author’s purpose. Students will need to master both of these skills before completing the Atlantic Essay.
Objective
Reading- 9.5.6.6 Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.
Speaking and Viewing- 9.9.3.3 Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, intended audience, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.
Language- 9.11.6.6 Acquire and use accurately general academic and domain-specific words and phrases, sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level.
Content Objective: I can identify rhetorical devices in a piece of informational writing and argue if the rhetorical devices I identified do or do not serve the author’s purpose for writing.
Language Objective: I can use declarative sentences to argue if a rhetorical device supports a text’s purpose, with content-specific rhetorical terms (allusion, simile, narrative, etc.) and the general-academic terms: occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone.
Function: Argue
Forms: Declarative Sentences
Vocabulary: content-specific rhetorical terms (allusion, simile, narrative, etc.) and the general-academic terms: occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone.
Directions
Assessment of Data
When working individually, students had a much more difficult time identifying rhetoric in this assignment than they did in groups with the Social Worker’s Report. They also struggled to make a focused claim about the author’s purpose for writing. For example, one student simply said the purpose was “to be funny.” Another student said the author’s purpose was “to exaggerate everything.” I inserted the discussion activity below to give them more practice with these skills.
