Assessing Reader Comprehension

The seniors will be finishing up Macbeth this week, which is very exciting because I feel that the unit has been a success overall! Over the past several months of teaching, I've come to like the combination of both a project and a small quiz or test to evaluate my students' comprehension. Just like with the Juniors' Gatsby unit, the seniors had a creative project that included creativity and peer collaboration. I detailed this project in my previous post, though, so I won't go into great detail.  However, each class completed the project and turned it in last week and the results were excellent. After weeks of struggling to keep them motivated during the last stretch of their senior year, the students actually got very into their projects and worked well within their groups.  All three Macbeth storybooks are in the process of being scanned in so I can show them to each class this week.

Although I chose the storybook idea, this document also provides a variety of ideas for Macbeth Projects. There are a lot of options (some of which I had wanted to use had I more time...), but I don't like giving students a dozen different project ideas to choose from. In my experience, it causes confusion and they spend the majority of their time trying decide on which project option instead of actually working on their projects. However, if a couple or few were chosen and rotated each school year, it would keep the unit fresh and fun for the teacher as well as the students.

To compliment my project, I have also written a small quiz (1 page front and back) that asks the students to do the following: place major events in order of their occurrence, multiple choice, short answer, matching terms to definitions. I feel like it has a good variety of question types that are able to assess the students' understanding. While attempting to develop this written assessment, I've run across several beneficial sources that have helped me focus on how to ask questions that follow things such as Bloom's Taxonomy AFT Pamphlet I had always found it a little tricky to develop questions that really assess on all levels so I found this pamphlet helpful.