Final Project Description

The following assessment ideas have been designed for a unit of literature circles during which English 3 Regents (primarily eleventh grade) students will study different pieces of American literature within small cooperative groups of 4-6 students. The pieces include The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I have decided to focus on this unit throughout the semester because it is the one my students are working on currently and it is one of my very favorites because it provides the opportunity to continue building upon the skills we’ve practiced in previous literature units while, I hope, offering students the chance to get more creative with their final projects while dealing with interpersonal skills and individual habits of mind that have real world applications.

Corroborated by Nitko and Brookhart, I have found that a combination of group and individual projects has been an effective approach to our third major literature unit of the year. It holds students accountable to one another by requiring them to “work together to create a high quality product” (248) but individual students must “have the ability to prepare final reports, interpret results on their own, and so on” (249). As such, I have created both group and individual learning targets along with different scoring rubrics and checklists. By and large, the various components of the unit best qualify as performance assessments, which is appropriate during the second semester after more traditional major assessments were completed during the first.

As individuals, students will be required to produce a log of their personal annotations of the text in a “reader’s journal,” which is collected and graded using a checklist. Also, each will be graded on participation by me and his/her own group mates using an analytic rubric provided in advance. These strictly individual assessments account for 150 points toward the unit grade. Notably, those students not participating at a satisfactory level may be removed from groups and held accountable to additional individual paper-and-pencil assessments.

In their groups, students will be required to submit a portfolio which will include various works, each of which addresses some specific aspect of comprehension or analysis of the text. The selections to be included, the criteria, and point values of each “mini project,” as I call them, are clearly delineated in a grading checklist that is distributed at the start of the unit. Knowing what is expected, student groups will also be responsible for writing a proposal that indicates thoughtful and cooperative planning of individual roles and time management throughout the unit, graded according to a checklist. Finally, group presentations of the various literature circles texts will be shared with the class and graded according to a checklist once again. These group assessments combine to account for 300 points of the final unit grade.