Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• Work Time A: Students complete Part I of the End of Unit 3 Assessment. In Part I, student crews present the picture book pages that they produced for their performance task about the focus figures they researched. Students show the picture book pages, highlight the figure’s most important achievements, and convey their argument about why this person’s accomplishments are remarkable. Members of the audience provide feedback on their classmates’ presentations and delineating their argument, claims, reasoning, and evidence. (SL.6.3, SL.6.4, SL.6.5, SL.6.6, L.6.6)
• In Opening A, students’ Mid-Unit 3 Assessments are returned with feedback. This allows students the opportunity to see how they performed in order to improve in their next assessment and to ask questions if they don’t understand the feedback.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• Create an air of celebration around the performance task presentations. Invite outside audience members, such as administrators, parents, or other students for either this lesson or the next.
• One aim of this performance task is to help students make heard and known the stories of women in space science whose contributions have gone unsung. To heighten the impact of students’ work and broaden the audience who will benefit from the students’ work, make the books available as a resource for other students (e.g., by providing copies of the books in the school library or sharing them with a local historical organization).
• Students who excel at graphic design could be tasked with creating promotional materials for the presentations, such as fliers, posters, and programs. Allow students to experiment with a free online design tool, such as http://eled.org/0254, to create these materials.
• Students could discuss or compose a written reflection on the similarities and/or differences among the presentations they viewed and the contributions by the focus figures featured in those presentations.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• Students have practiced presenting and delineating arguments in Lessons 5 and 10 of this unit. They have also created and rehearsed with their crewmates their presentation for today’s lesson.

Support All Students

• Students may need additional support reading aloud their presentations and showing visuals. Support students with their presentations as needed.
• Students who are unable to present to a larger audience could video record their presentation, and this could be played to the audience instead of being presented live.
• ELLs may find the assessment challenging, despite the days spent preparing and practicing their presentations. Allow students to practice their presentations one last time before visitors arrive. ▲

Assessment Guidance

• The End of Unit 3 Assessment is included in the Assessment Overview and Resources.
• When assessing and providing feedback to students on this assessment, use the provided Assessment checklist for each student. Prioritize listening in on students with less data regarding their speaking and listening skills.
• Display a schedule that identifies when students are presenting and when students are assessing others’ presentations and delineating others’ arguments. This preparation will promote a balance of peer viewers and presenters. See the In Advance section for important additional information.
• Utilize a timer to keep presentations on track.
• Encourage students to give one another a word of congratulations or a nonverbal cue of congratulations after viewing one another’s presentations.
• If possible, video record students’ presentations, and watch the videos with students afterward to evaluate their volume, eye contact, intonation, and clarity of responses to the presentation prompts.
• Though the performance tasks are the content students will work with, the End of Unit 3 Assessment is focused on their presentation, listening, and argument delineation skills. The quality of their performance task should not impact the End of Unit 3 Assessment scores.
• The performance tasks at the end of every module are neither formative nor summative assessments. They are not formative since they come at the end of the module, concluding students’ learning about the module topic and the literacy skills they have built over eight or nine weeks. However, they are also not summative because they are heavily scaffolded to help students create high-quality work, and so are not a strong measure of what students can do independently. For these reasons, we do not recommend analyzing performance tasks with the same lens used to analyze assessments. Look at students’ performance tasks through the lens of the attributes of high-quality student work (authenticity, complexity, and craftsmanship).

Down the Road

• The next lesson is the final lesson of this module. Students participate in a collaborative discussion to bring the module and the year to a close. Students may also share their children’s book pages with a wider audience, depending on the opportunities available at the specific school site.