Students have been learning about dialogue tags and building case files for a character in Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan. I wanted to assess student learning for this first week. I assess my students regularly in order to provide intervention as soon as possible. I do not want to wait until the end of a three-week unit to find out students have not mastered a particular standard or spent such a length of time cementing misconceptions.
Dialogue tags are something I have to review each day to ensure students are able to identify who is speaking in the text. This quiz allowed me to assess how they would do independently with a different story. I also assessed how well students are able to use story clues to identify character traits based on words and actions.
I used leveled texts for the quiz. I wanted to ensure students’ reading level did not interfere with their ability to demonstrate mastery of the objective. The questions were the same at each level, with character names changed to match the story.