Assessment Projects

This webpage has a handful of very interesting projects that can be used to determine the students' level of engagement and understanding of the text. The one I'm most interested in is the "choose-your-own-adventure" strategy. As a child I really enjoyed these books, because it was almost like reading 10 books all into one, and if I didn't like the ending, I could always retrace my steps and start again. I had tried an activity similar to the one described here during my contract teaching stint with my secondary 1 English classes and the students really enjoyed the task.

Holland, who wrote this article, used this as an assessment for learning strategy. Her students had difficulty with the concept of foreshadowing, and having them think up alternative outcomes from the text that they were studying helped them to think more deeply about the text. She highlights the fact that this project allows students to create a new story alongside the existing one, which forces them to identify critical moments in the text in which a different choice made would have resulted in a different outcome. What is being assessed here is their ability to identify the most important events in the text, and, on a deeper level, their ability to determine and replicate the traits and attributes of the characters in different situations than those outlined in the original text.

A tool that could be used for this assessment strategy is the Inkle Writerwebsite. This website allows for easy writing and sharing of the choose-your-own-adventure type of story, offering tools that aid in the mapping and writing process. There are also examples of short stories written using the software that can be shown to the class as examples. Teachers may offer help in the drafting phase to guide students, and this assessment activity would probably be better suited for upper secondary students who would be better suited to handle this complex task.