Sample Performance Tasks for Stories, Drama, and Poetry
• Students summarize the development of the morality of Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain’s novel of the same name and analyze its connection to themes of accountability and authenticity by noting how it is conveyed through characters, setting, and plot. [RL.8.2]
• Students compare and contrast Laurence Yep’s fictional portrayal of Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco in Dragonwings to historical accounts of the same period (using materials detailing the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) in order to glean a deeper understanding of how authors use or alter historical sources to create a sense of time and place as well as make fictional characters lifelike and real. [RL.7.9]
• Students cite explicit textual evidence as well as draw inferences about the drake and the duck from Katherine Paterson’s The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks to support their analysis of the perils of vanity. [RL.6.1]
• Students explain how Sandra Cisneros’s choice of words develops the point of view of the young speaker in her story “Eleven.” [RL.6.6]
• Students analyze how the playwright Louise Fletcher uses particular elements of drama (e.g., setting and dialogue) to create dramatic tension in her play Sorry, Wrong Number. [RL.7.3]
• Students compare and contrast the effect Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” has on them to the effect they experience from a multimedia dramatization of the event presented in an interactive digital map (http://www.paulreverehouse.org/ride/), analyzing the impact of different techniques employed that are unique to each medium. [RL.6.7]
• Students analyze Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” to uncover the poem’s analogies and allusions. They analyze the impact of specific word choices by Whitman, such as rack and grim, and determine how they contribute to the overall meaning and tone of the poem. [RL.8.4]
• Students analyze how the opening stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” structures the rhythm
and meter for the poem and how the themes introduced by the speaker develop over the course of the text. [RL.6.5]