CCHS foreign language department chair Emily Hulse stands in Room 395 on March 26 holding a student’s version of the French III fairytale project, a summative grade to assess the use of different tenses. Hulse has conducted this project for five years to assess her students’ French abilities. “It’s their choice if they want to write something or act something out. But if they act something out, there is that added pronunciation piece in there that won’t be as critically graded,” Hulse said. Photo by Peter Atchley
CCHS foreign language department chair Emily Hulse has conducted the French III fairy tale summative project to provide students with a chance to show content mastery.
Non-traditional project-based summatives like CCHS foreign language department Chair Emily Hulse’s French III fairytale project allows students to use creativity to demonstrate content mastery.
For Hulse, some of the best ways to analyze student language learning are through projects, and for French III specifically, writing and speaking. Students in Hulse’s French III class will be working on the French III fairytale project to gauge their ability on the use of different sentence tenses.
“(The summative is) going to be testing them on a couple of things. The main thing I’m looking for is their grasp of the two forms of the past when telling a story,” Hulse said. “I want them to do something creative with the vocabulary and also with those grammar points in mind.”
“I think it is fun because you get to be creative. You get to use your own words to decide how you want to write out your fairytale,”
— Doan Duong,
CCHS sophomore
The three tenses French III students will be tested on for the project are predicate, perfect past, and imperfect tense. For French III student Doan Duong, a sophomore, the summative project requires an understanding of the real-world use of the different tenses to write the fairytales.
“I think it is fun because you get to be creative. You get to use your own words to decide how you want to write out your fairytale,” Duong said.
For Hulse, students being able to apply the content they have learned is an important step that cannot be assessed using traditional tests. A project-based summative allows the student’s final test on a unit to be through real-world experience and usage.
“I think that (non-traditional summative) appeal to the students more than a traditional test and it has them being able to use their creativity more than a traditional test would,” Hulse said. “So if they can do it more creatively, first of all, it’s more memorable, there’s more buy-in, and it’s less stressful.”
