Monday, March 9, 2009
Final Assessment Project
For my final assessment I am planning on doing a debate. The debate will focus on the issue of the novel’s community as a Utopian Society. One of the sides will take the stance that the way the community is run is beneficial to the community members while the other will argue that the community’s ways are destructive and not positive for those involved. The students will use their knowledge of the characters, plot, and other conventions of the story to form their arguments. In order to gain a strong understanding of these concepts activities focusing on the specific aspects will be presented throughout the unit. For the actual debate the student will be provided with guidelines and some type of rubric/checklist. They will be graded both as a group and individually.
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Oooo. This is fun.
ReplyDeleteTeam debates are tough because you are - to an extent - judging *individual* student achievement based on *group* performance. Also, students who are more eloquent can mask their lack of understanding and students who are quite will not fully exhibit theirs. (Think classical test theory: What's "e" in this assessment?)
The way to work around this you need a solid assignment sheet that describes how each individual student is expected to contribute. This is more than a checklist, and includes the structure of the debate (ABBA?) and the protocols you will follow to maintain an orderly conversation.
Also, your division of positions (pro/con) lends to less meaningful debate. Students can just fall on the stereotypical view of this issue and every point/counterpoint will fall on the same priorities.
Why not skip the assignment part? Instead pass out a list of issues related to the Community (release, family structure, employment decisions, etc.) and tell students that they will have a groups discussion where they will be called on at random to either support or dispute the Community's position on the issues.
Now, you still have an unknown "e" because you'll only be able to sample a couple of tasks from each student. But you'll get out of the "think like the elders OR think like Jonas" dichotomy and require students to be able to switch point-of-view.
In any case, I will expect to see the following from you:
1. The assignment sheet including the format of the debate.
2. The scoring rubric.
3. Ten written examples of student comments and how they would be scored per your rubric. These examples must represent a range of scores.
Email me if you have any questions.