Sunday, June 3, 2012

Testing Reliability

For the fifth week of this course, we worked with different theories regarding validity, reliability and accuracy. We were shown how to create assessments that support learning outcomes through various methods of assessments, but also the ability to determine their authenticity through a variety of error measurements.

For this case, I will be providing a performance assessment for literary analysis, that is, applying analytical skills and knowledge of literary analysis to reading and writing about poetry. Since it is a liberal arts course, I will be using different performance assessments when testing my students and rating their ability to comprehend and connect with the written form of art. From all of these different assessments, the points will be weighed equally giving fair opportunity to all students for their final grade. For this performance assessments there will be three different sets used to score.

In the beginning of the course, the students will work on diction and cadence through oral presentations and group discussions. In the course, we will be working with four different legendary poets, each from a different culture and background and will be pulled from medieval texts, for example, one of the books, Beowulf, the students would practice until the final assessment where they are orally presenting what they have learned about interpretation and the pace and tonality of the reading. Beowulf is from Scandinavia and is an old English epic poem consisting of heroic acts and very long poetry stances. The student can choose to research the difference in the tones from those time periods to our current time periods and will be scored on their effort to orally interpret the poems as originally told. They will be graded on consistency and depth of understanding, meaning that, as long as the students put forth a genuine effort and their interpretation is fitting or accurate with the time period of Beowulf, they will earn the points. The only way to fail this assessment would be to have no change in current diction or cadence which would prove minimal effort in researching the current aspects of the poetry’s tonality and the rhythm of the long stances.

For the second assessment, we will be working with the poems of the Arabian Knights. The assessment will be the final week of the class and the student will be required to rewrite the AK in a more modern fashion as if to compare those epic poems of war and struggle to our current global struggles to compromise. The students will be required to identify specific elements of the poem that are re-occurring throughout the story and design the structure and intention of the original poet. They will upgrade the dialect to an Anglo-Saxon one while still getting the same message across about war, control and the history of mankind’s various battle fields. It will be a written assessment and the students will have the option to share segments as presentations to the class, but it is not required. Rather the only requirement given points as a hand-in creative portfolio is the quality and effort of the translation of the text from the former translation set forth in the past. Again, one of the only ways to lose points in this assessment is to no put forth creative and cognitive creative skills efforts to exercise the mind and reconsider how language is used several thousand years after the stories were originally told.

The very last assessment, students will collaborate with one another in small groups. Each group will be given a medieval text of poetry and through the course, the groups must work together to create a 15-minute dramatic presentation in which they create a scene and stage for the stories depending on the time period, the region or the social and political aspects of the times. The costumes must be created from the most minimal of sources, in other words, they are not allowed to buy remakes of interpretations of how people were dressed in this time period. They must, instead, innovate what is around them, to recreate the style of living in the characteristics of the humans in their time period. This performance assessment will be one-third of the grade, just like the other two assessments and will take place the last two weeks of class. The students will share their different dramatic scenes created with other groups. The students will have the whole semester to prepare for this and will be given the option of which day they would like to present their dramatic interpretation. The scoring system for this assessment, must like the other scoring systems, will be mostly decided upon effort and authenticity. The only way to lose points for this assessment would be to show a lack of research on the culture and time period of the poet and poetry. In this example, the students
As long as the students are innovative and show through their performance different aspects of the research that inspired them to recreate the scene. were to study Boethius, the Constellation of Philosophy, the poet and philosopher of the early 6th century, they would, in turn, study the history of the Roman courts and their laws and the social and political elements of the Roman Empire, Boethius, being imprisoned while writing the Constellation of Philosophy, created a work of poetry that opposed the Roman laws and defied restrictions of religious shame induction. During the fall of the Roman Empire, there was total chaos and madness and Boethius, instead of combatting what he disagreed with, he recorded it so that readers and learners could get an idea of his convictions without him directly having to deal with the Roman courts up front. The students would research where the divisions of enlightenment and controlled Catholicism divided. So when the team presents their dramatic performance of Boethius, they would show through creative innovation, what they learned about the history and how they felt about the circumstances.

Ultimately, the learning outcome for this course is to gain a compassion and empathy for the poet given the circumstances of the medieval time period in which they composed their works. And by understanding the roots of literary arts and their origins, in this outcome of integrating the different elements of history, religion, culture and wisdom into a clear interpretation that lends a poetic structure of some sort that has become epic for readers around the globe. They will learn about the medieval time period, they will learn about barbaric, they will learn about hermits, but ultimately, the idea is to travel back in time and to experience what they experienced in order to understand the strengths and potentials of poems and the structures that have attracted people for thousands of years. They will determine which type of poetic methods can be used for these different categories and by accessing higher levels of thinking and creativity to integrate the time travel into a scene, they will view the poem through the eyes of the poet, the eyes of the humans at the time and understand how interpretations into modern language can still have the same effectiveness of these original poetic structures. They will walk away with more empathy for poetry wherein the poet is able to capture beauty through his mind’s eye amidst tumultuous times of history. They will understand the power poetry had for medieval thinkers and have a full comprehension of the importance of this literary art in marking the evolution of mankind to higher levels of consciousness.


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