eight percent. In 4B the average unit score was seventy-nine percent and the average quiz score was eighty-eight percent. Looking at scores from the nineteen-point assessment, there was a difference of two percentage points between the quiz grade and the unit grade. Even though the scores on the nineteen-point quiz are more in line with overall scores, I maintain that the seventeen-point quiz results were more accurate because there was such a clear pattern of low scores in one section of the quiz, even among typically high-performing students. This revealed to me a somewhat faulty quiz design more than failure on the students’ part. The comparison of these students’ scores on this summative assessment provided a useful mirror that I believe reflects student learning as a whole during this unit, but that also reflects the way in which assessment design can affect assessment outcomes. Post-Assessments Because of time constraints, the unit outlined in this work sample only covered Acts I through III of The Merchant of Venice. However, after completing this work sample I will work collaboratively with my cooperating teacher on dynamic activities to help students parse and process the last two acts of the play. Our activities will primarily focus on the climactic courtroom scene in Act IV, in which key characters consider whether to interpret the law with severe justice or extraordinary mercy. Working in small groups, students will choose to work with selected excerpts of the play. Each group will be responsible for translating its excerpt, answering key questions about the passage, and presenting a creative summary of their excerpt to the class. The presentations could be straightforward summaries, reenactments, or original songs and poems. Essentially, the students will collectively teach each other about the events and themes in Act IV. Once students have been through the entire play and considered its themes from multiple angles, we will revisit the pre-assessments of the Carousel Charts, word clouds, and Values Scale. I look forward to seeing the changes in students’ responses to prompts in these activities regarding their knowledge of the play’s events, characters and conventions, as well as changes in the way they view key issues in the play. For example, in our initial Justice and Mercy discussions that accompanied predictions for Act IV, several students stated that they expected Shylock would indeed cut Antonio’s pound of flesh because the law said that he could, and the law cannot be argued with (or in other words, the law can only be interpreted in one way). But at the end of our Justice and Mercy discussions, students were providing much more complex answers, and were even seeking complex solutions for Shakespeare’s characters as well as for the people affected by the realworld cases we read about. They were thinking in sophisticated ways -- looking for interpretations of the law that would include both justice and mercy, rather than one or the other. Because of discussions like this, I am confident that the postassessments of the Carousel Charts and the Values Scale will show dramatically different results than the pre-assessments.
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