I did a short formative assessment on the literary term, personification. After they read the short story, "There will Come Soft Rains," I asked them three questions: what is personification, cite examples of it, and what was the inanimate object was personified. 75% of the sophomores got 3/3. 25% did not. I realized that most of the kids that didn't get it were kids on IEP's. From the help of a student, I realized my vocabulary word, inanimate, was confusing some of those kids. I am now going to think about how I word my questions and repeat to them that they should ask if they don't understand something I'm asking.
I also learned the value in asking those questions immediately after the story instead of asking at the end of the "unit," because in the next story, they were able to pick the personification out. The changes to my lesson plan was to go over personification again and pick examples out together in class, so they can do that independently in the future.
I enjoyed figuring out the data because it was very quick and gave me instant results of what was going on that day- not a week later. The formative assessment worked well for literary terms, but can be done with nearly everything.
