Recently, my students have been improving their composition skills by learning to write a literary analysis. After teaching a unit last fall that covered this material and then revisiting it again recently, it still seemed to me that the students were failing to understand how to successfully use this type of writing in reviewing a piece of literature. I thought it would help the students if they could see the skills involved laid out in a progression and then have the opportunity to assess their own acquisition of these skills.
I administered a formative assessment that asked each student to assess where they were on a continuum of skills involved in writing a literary analysis. Then I gave 3 brief assessments to determine if they had correctly assessed how well they had learned the required skills. After the students and I all had a sense of how well they had mastered the skills, I then reviewed the material again, giving the students time to concentrate specifically on those areas where there was a breakdown in skills. I paired struggling students with others who had successfully mastered the skill and allowed them to study and analyze writing samples from those students, picking out components and assessing the degree to which the writing successfully reflected the purpose of the writing assignment--to analyze the plot, setting or theme of a given story.
What I learned from administering the formative assessment was this: What I perceived to be a fairly simple task, i.e., writing a 3 paragraph literary analysis, could actually be broken down into 5 separate tasks. It would have been a simpler task for the students if I would have initially broken it down and defined the different aspects of the task for them. I think it is likely they would have been successful in their initial attempts and it wouldn't have become such a laborious task.
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