To prepare students for their summative Atlantic Essay, I created a series of formative assessments that target the same standards. The essay assessment comes after the Rhetoric Challenge Pretest and the Social Worker’s Report and Governor’s Budget Fiasco formative assignments. The Social Worker’s Report apprenticed students through the tasks of identifying an author’s rhetorical choices and describing if they were effective in advancing a given purpose. The Governor’s Budget Fiasco asked students to complete a similar series of tasks and identify an author’s purpose. The Atlantic Essay exercises both of these skills. On this page, I provide links to each formative assessment’s pages (containing an assessment description and analysis of data). I also include the summative assessment description, objectives, and rubric, and I demonstrate how I provide students with feedback on their work. I grade the Atlantic essay with a weighted competency-based rubric. The rubric, which I used for all written assignments in this unit, allows students to see their competency in five key areas. I weight the areas that the formative assessment data indicates students need more practice to master less than the other areas. Therefore, I can provide students with honest feedback without punishing them for still working on a skill.

Formative Assessments (leading to summative)
Summative Assessment Description & Rubric
Examples of Feedback
Formative Assessments (leading to summative)

Click on the links to visit each assessment’s page.

Each assessment page contains a description, objective, and analysis of assessment data.

1. Pretest- Rhetoric Challange

2. Formative- Social Worker’s Report

3. Formative- Governor’s Budget Fiasco

4. Summative- The Atlantic Essay Assignment

Summative Assessment Description & Rubric

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.