Assessment Week and Performance Tasks

Along with a lot of other changes I am making this year in my classroom to improve the thinking and reasoning skills of my students, I am adapting how we do our quarterly assessments.

This year were are dedicating a week at the end of each quarter for Benchmark Assessments.

The schedule looks like this:

Benchmark Assessment Part One: 
The students will be given two days to take the multiple choice section. The multiple choice questions will be similar to constructed response questions, but with multiple choice answers. The multiple choice section of the test will be scanned through Illuminate.

Benchmark Assessment Part Two: 
The students will complete a creative writing assignment on a concept from the quarter.  The writing assessment will be graded on a rubric and the score will be averaged into the final benchmark score.

Here are examples of The Concept Writing Assessments for 8th Grade Common Core Math:

Concept Writing Assessment (1):  The Animal Mix-up and Combining Like Terms
Concept Writing Assessment (2):  Lost in Scatter Plot City
Concept Writing Assessment (3):  Rational and Irrational Numbers
Concept Writing Assessment (4):  Mystery in Transformationville

Benchmark Assessment Part Three: 
The students will be given two days to complete a performance task that will cover multiple concepts.  The performance task will be cumulative as well as contain main concepts from the current quarter.  The performance task will be similar in structure to the SBAC performances tasks that have been released. We will grade the performance task on a rubric and so it can be scanned through Illuminate.

I am excited to try our new assessment week... At the same time I am a little nervous because we are not reviewing for the assessment week.  I am just hoping that with the new additions to my daily lessons, that the students are ready for this type of assessment week... :o)

Update:
Here are samples of the writing assessments I did with my Algebra and Geometry classes:
Algebra Writing Assessment:  The Quadratic Formula and the Three Little Letters
Geometry Writing Assessment: The Quadrilateral Family Tree