Summative Assessments

The end of unit exam is the most high-stakes assessment of each unit and is designed to be entirely skills-based. The unit exam, taken at the end of each unit, tests students’ mastery of the specific standards that we focused on throughout the unit, and it is designed in two parts: multiple choice, with questions mirroring the format of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) exam, and a writing task, based on the Answer-Cite-Explain (ACE) writing strategy. The data gained from the unit exam measures students’ mastery of the unit as a whole and helps guide my decision making as I plan the next unit. This data, compared with the formative assessment data, helps me continue to monitor my students’ progress, as well as to evaluate where students are making mistakes — whether due to skill misunderstandings or the wording of specific questions and answer choices. Below is a breakdown and analysis of my Number the Stars unit exam.

 
 
 

preparing for the unit exam

Each unit exam is planned at the beginning of the unit, before even the first lesson plans are created, which allows me to backwards-plan the entire unit. The question types on the unit exam guide my decision making when creating formative assessments, as I aim to mirror the questions on exit tickets so students are set up for success when their unit exams are in front of them. Additionally, in correlating the exit ticket questions to the unit exam questions, I can better anticipate which distractors will be most difficult and plan class and review time to address those potential misconceptions.

In Part 1, students are required to evaluate specific passages from the novel. The passages students are asked to evaluate on the unit exam are passages I do not have the students analyze in class, so while they have already read the text, they have not had direct instruction of analyzing that specific passage. You can see in the teacher-facing version of the unit exam to the left that I have intellectually prepared the exam, noting which standard is aligned to each question, as well as which answer choice is the intended distractor.

Part 2 of the exam is a writing task, which directs students to (1) deconstruct the prompt using the Task-About What-Skill (TAS) method, (2) re-read a passage from the novel and read an informational text new to them, and (3) compare the two using graphic organizers modeled after the ACE writing strategy. In the teacher-facing exam to the left, I have pre-determined the thesis, which citations would be the most strong, and exemplary explanations.

 
 
 
 

Student SAMPLES of the Unit exam

Below are three student samples of the unit exam. The unit exam was completed in two parts: multiple choice, which can be seen on pages 1-6 on each test, and a writing task, on pages 7-11 on each test with final student work on pages 10-11. In evaluating these tests and comparing them to students who scored similarly, I was able to gather the following data:

  • The first, to the far left, was completed by a lower-level student who scored a 28% on the exam, missing 12 of the 15 multiple choice questions and scoring 4 out of 10 on the writing task. Commonalities among other students who scored similarly was a lack of annotating passages and questions, skipping the planning phase of the writing task (TAS), and poor performance on the writing task, specifically in identifying a theme and strong evidence.

  • The second exam, in the middle, was completed by a middle-level student who scored a 75% on the exam, missing 4 multiple choice questions and scoring 6 on the writing task. Commonalities among students scoring in this range included some annotations, choosing several distractor answer choices, and difficulty identifying a theme to write about in the writing task. Many of these students identified the exemplary evidence; however, their inability to craft a strong theme statement to build from prevented them from earning an 8 or above on the writing task.

  • The third sample, to the far right, was completed by a higher-level student who scored a 94% on the exam, missing 2 multiple choice questions and scoring a 10 on the writing task. Only three students in 7th grade scored above a 90% on the exam, and of these students, they had strong process-of-elimination skills and did well identifying and supporting the theme in the writing task.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Unit exam data & analysis

To the right is a breakdown of class mastery per standard tested on the unit exam, with page 1 showing a mastery overview of the entire 7th grade and page 2 showing mastery per standard per class.

Overall, students did not score well on this exam, averaging only 60% grade-wide; however, in my experience, I learn the most from exams that do not have the best data. In analyzing the results of this unit exam, I was able to monitor students’ progress and guide the decisions to make in my next unit — to take my own instruction from good, to better, to best.

 
 

A few key takeaways from this unit exam include:

  • I need to better align exit ticket questions to unit exam questions and incorporate more of these types of questions within the lesson, so that students have as much exposure to the language of different question types as possible.

  • Students need more practice with writing tasks that mirror the unit exam. Because my school separates Reading class and Writing class, I do not generally plan for longer-form writing tasks in class; however, expecting students to be able to master a long-response prompt on a unit exam requires more of the same throughout the unit.

  • Student mastery on RL.7.4, RL.6, and RL.7.9 was higher and shows growth toward mastery, see page 1. These were the focus standards of the unit, which means students did the best where they should have done the best. The next unit focuses on RL.7.2, and I have strong data to inform the best way to teach that standard.

While data coded in red is not what I want at the end of the year, having this data at the beginning of the year is extremely valuable — it shows that we have work to do and where exactly that work needs to be done. The use of summative assessment in my classroom is not as the “end all be all” of a students’ measure of success, but rather a growth marker that is used to set goals and celebrate the small wins. In framing the unit exam in such a way, students are able to engage in their growth as learners and I am able to better plan for their growth as their teacher.