Laura Stadele

EDUC450: Tricia Engelhardt

Data Analysis of Lesson 2
November 28, 2015
This lesson was taught to a 9th-grade Tier-II Intervention class with a focus on Read 180.
These students are low-level readers and writers and require extra help with grammar,
punctuation, spelling, and reading/writing skills. Out of a total of 21 students there are 5 ELL
students and 2 students with a 504/IEP.
The lesson that Mr. Walker and I taught focused on the story elements seen in Edgar
Allen Poes The Cask of Amontillado and how students can identify irony and foreshadowing
within the story. We started the lesson off by having students complete a journal about revenge
(one of the themes of the story), then they completed their Read 180 sections before taking a
Google Forms pre-test (which we had to administer verbally since the Google Form wasnt
working), then they dove into a pre-reading activity about the vocabulary found within The
Cask of Amontillado and how to better understand the context/setting of the story, then we
watched a short 15-minute movie version of The Cask of Amontillado, before doing a postreading activity that explored the different story elements seen in the story. Mr. Walker and I
finished up the lesson by having students complete the Google Forms test once again as a postreading assessment.
For this specific lesson I will be looking at how well the ELL students do VS how well
the Non-ELL students do on the short ten-question multiple choice Google Forms pre-test and
post-test. The standard I am focusing on assessing is:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.10
By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in
the grades 9-10 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of
the range.
The reason I am focusing on this standard is because the pre/post test asks students to
identify the definition of the basic story elements such as: what is a protagonist? Antagonist?
What is conflict? Exposition? Theme? Etc. and knowing what these foundational elements are
will help students to read and comprehend literature. In order to teach them about the two
elementsirony and foreshadowingthat are unfamiliar to students on the pre-test we will be
going through The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe to help them identify what those
elements are (and all the other basic elements). Once students have completed the Cask
reading activity they will complete the post-test.
I predict that the majority of students will get around an 80% or higher on the pre-test
since 8/10 questions are going to be review over things they already know and only 2/10 are on
things they dont know. On the post-test I predict that the majority of students will get a 90% or
higher depending on how well they complete the in-class assignments. I predict that the ELL
students will score slightly lower that non-ELL students.
The Google Forms pre and post-test we administered looked like this:

Story Elements Quiz

* Required
First Name *
Last Name *
1. What is a protagonist? *
o supplemental characters of a story
o the leading character of a story
o a person who opposes the the leading action
2. What is an antagonist? *
o supplemental characters of a story
o the leading character of a story
o a person who opposes the leading action
3. What is setting? *
o environment in which a story takes place
o an environment mentioned in the text
o the environment you are sitting in reading this
4. What is exposition? *
o the part of the story that talks about unimportant events that occur
o

outside of the plot

the part of a story that talks about an important background to the

readers or audience like for instance, the setting of the story, about the
characters, happenings or events that occurs before the main plot
o general events that happen in the story
5. What is conflict? *
o the beginning of the story, introducing characters and setting
o the end of the story where events are resolved
o an event that causes tension or interest in a story
6. What is rising action? *
o a series of events that occurs after the climax of a story
o a series of related events that build toward the climax
o the event in the story everything has been building to
7. What is the climax? *
o the turning point of the narrative; the most exciting moment
o the introduction of the characters at the beginning of a story
o the part in the story where the character is introduced to the conflict
8. What is theme? *
o the misspelling of the word "team"
o the introduction to the story
o the main topic of the story; what the story is trying to tell the reader
9. What is dramatic irony? *
o when the audience understands something the character does not
o when something that is not supposed to happen, happens
o a character throwing a fit because their clothes were not properly ironed
10. What is foreshadowing? *

o
o
o

when the sun hits a person from directly above and creates more than
three, but less than five shadows
a warning or hint at a future event
the point of the story where all events come together

Never submit passwords through Google Forms.

100%: You made it.

The pre and post test remained the same because we wanted to be able to see how well the
students actually understood the different story elements after we taught the lesson, and we
thought we would see the most growth if the test was familiar to students. The pre-test was not
counted for a grade but students were graded on the post-test (10 points total).
The following two graphs depict how well the Non-ELL and ELL students actually did
on the pre-test compared to the post-test, and the last graph is a representation of how well the
whole class did on their pre-test as compared to the post-test. On the bottom of the graphs you
will see each students name and above their name you will see two lines: the blue line depicts
how well (%) they did on the pre-test and the orange line depicts how well (%) they did on the
post-test.

Non-ELL Student Results

Pre-Test

Post-Test

The Non-ELL students scored an average of 68% on the pre-test and an

average of 80% on the post-test. They scored a bit lower than I predicted for
both the pre and post tests.

ELL Student Results

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%

Alex

Yamileth

Noe
Pre-Test

Greymond

Kevin

Post-Test

The ELL Students scored an average of 62% on the pre-test and an average
of 42% on the post-test. These students definitely scored lower than I
predicted, and actually did worse on the post-test as compared to the pretest which was surprising.

Whole Class Results

Pre-Test

Post-Test

As a whole class students scored an average of 66% on the pre-test and an

average of 69% on the post-test. Overall, both the pre-test and the post-test
scores were lower than I predicated and lower than I hoped to see.

The learning target Mr. Walker and I had in mind when planning this
lesson was to see if students were able to correctly identify and review the
basic story elements and to be able to identify and analyze what irony and
foreshadowing are after viewing The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen
Poe. These pre and post-test results have shown me that the lesson Mr.
Walker and I taught helped increase student learning of these concepts by an
average of 3%. Of course some students responded to this lesson better than
others, for example: Cassidy scored a 50% on her pre-test and an 80% on
the post-test, so her understanding of these concepts increased by 30%.
Whereas, other students, like Josh, scored higher on their pre-test than they
did on their post-test and experienced a marked decrease in their
understanding of these concepts. But, I believe we are seeing these types of
discrepancies for a few key reasons:
1) Mr. Walker and I administered the Pre-Test orally as well as visually and
went through each question with the class, allowing them time to write
their answers on a scrap piece of paper. Having the pre-test be both
visual and verbal increased understanding for a lot of students.
Whereas, Mr. Walker and I administered the post-test through Google
Forms and the students completed the quiz right before class ended on
their own individual computers. For the post-test, we did not read out
the questions and multiple-choice answers verbally and so I believe
this contributed to the marked decrease in understanding with some
students.
And:
2) The pre-test took place two days before students were able to take the
post-test because the lesson we had planned took longer than just one
class period to complete. I believe having the lesson stretch on to two
different days decreased student understanding of the concepts
because they had a gap between lessons and were learning different
content in-between the time Mr. Walker and I were able to finish our
original lesson.
In order to be more successful with this lesson in the future I will focus on
three areas where this lesson needed improvement:
1) Review: before administering the pre-test I believe students would
be more successful if I were to review the story elements and their
definitions, especially with a low-level class like this. I know that this
pre-test is a way to test their knowledge of the story elements, but,
the goal is to get them to actually understand these concepts so if I
did some review before giving them the test then maybe students
would understand the questions a little better and be able to
correctly identify what each story element means and how it works
within a text. In order to see if student understanding does improve
I would then give students the post-test on the same day as I gave
them the pre-test, but I wouldnt review the material before

administering the test this time. In this way, I could see if students
were able to understand the story elements, and especially the new
elementsirony and foreshadowingthat they learn through this
lesson.
2) Consistency: instead of administering the pre-test orally and
having students write their answers on a scrap piece of paper, like
Mr. Walker and I were forced to do this time, I would make sure that
students were able to access this pre-test via Google Forms before
class so that they take the pre-test in the same format as the posttest. I believe consistency is key, and if students take the test in one
specific format one day and then another the next it could be
confusing. In order to eliminate any confusion and any
discrepancies in the students scores I would administer both tests
electronically. And if the Google Forms doesnt work then I would
administer both tests verbally and have them write down their
answers. The fact that Mr. Walker and I were inconsistent in our
testing format may have affected student learning and student
scores.
3) Differentiation: this class seems to do better when they are given
any type of information in multiple formats. Although Mr. Walker and
I did differentiate to the best of our abilities, there is still more we
could do. In order to help students learn the content of our lesson
we had them watch the short story The Cask of Amontillado by
Edgar Allen Poe and then we went through and discussed the story
elements that we saw in the film and how irony and foreshadowing
played a big role in the story. But, I believe if we were to have
students read the short story after we watched the film of it they
may have understood the concepts better, and they would have
been able to see some concrete examples of written irony and
foreshadowing. Even though we had verbal, visual, and written
examples, having multiple formats of the same story could help
increase student understanding of that story because one student
who watches something and understands may not be able to read it
and understand and vice versa.
In order to see if any of these strategies help increase student
understanding, I would once again analyze the pre and post-tests and
compare it to this original lessons results and see if student scores went up.