How can students show what they truly understand, not just what they can remember?

This question sat at the center of our recent work with sixth-grade ELA teachers, and it pushed us to rethink what meaningful assessment should look like. While there is an important place for both formative check-ins and traditional multiple-choice measures, we also know they cannot, on their own, capture the depth, creativity, or analysis our learners are ready for. They don’t reflect the kind of communicators, thinkers, and creators we are committed to developing through the Portrait of a Graduate.

That question sparked a collaborative redesign grounded in standards, student voice, and purposeful scaffolds.

Beginning With Purpose

To begin this process, we anchored the work in a Deep Study of Literature unit that elevates two high-priority power standards asking students to analyze how characters change and how authors craft meaning, skills that require reflection, interpretation, and synthesis.

After reviewing our existing assessments, we realized they were strong but leaned more toward retrieval than application. Students could answer questions about a text, but they weren’t consistently invited to create something that showed their understanding.

So we stepped back and mapped the learning progression, ensuring the lessons we planned would build the thinking, analysis, and independence students would need for a redesigned performance-based assessment that felt more authentic to the work of real readers and writers.

To bring this vision to life, we redesigned the end-of-unit task into a Character Journey Multimedia Presentation created in Book Creator, an easy-to-use digital publishing tool. Students will now be able to:

• analyze a character’s growth
  
• highlight key scenes and turning points
  
• explain how setting, tone, and mood shape meaning
  
• examine how figurative language deepens understanding
  
• identify a theme and connect it to a real-world idea
  
• communicate through visuals, narration, and design
  

To support clarity and expectations, our teachers created a full model of the assessment in Book Creator. This anchor text helps students see what thoughtful synthesis looks and sounds like before creating their own.

Intentional Activities That Build Toward the Assessment

To prepare students for their multimedia presentation, we designed scaffolded activities that mirror the thinking and design work they will ultimately do in Book Creator. Each experience targets a specific part of the final task and gives students a clear, engaging entry point into their project.

1. Color & Trait Character Moment

Why this matters: Visualizing emotion helps students interpret character behavior with greater precision.

Students choose a color and a character trait that represents their character in a key moment and write a short explanation using a sentence starter such as, “I chose the color ___ because it shows how my character feels ___.” This builds the foundation for selecting purposeful visuals in their Character Journey slide.

2. Language That Reveals Character

Why this matters: Figurative language helps students articulate emotional nuance within a scene.

Students craft a simile, a metaphor, and an imagery sentence that describe a selected moment. Then they identify a character trait shown in that moment and explain how the character demonstrates it using starters like, “A trait that fits my character here is ___ because ___.” This integrated activity strengthens their analysis of both mood and character behavior.

3. Mood Music Match + Voice-Over Reflection

Why this matters: Connecting music to mood encourages students to think metacognitively about tone and emotional impact.

Students choose a song that matches the mood of a key scene and write a brief explanation of the connection. They then record a 30–45-second Book Creator voice-over explaining how specific lyrics reflect the character’s emotions or decisions. This prepares them for the narrated components of their final presentation. You can access this activity here.

4. Tone Trajectory Graph (ELA–Math Interdisciplinary Extension)

Why this matters: Visualizing tone changes across a text helps students understand how emotional intensity shifts and prepares them to communicate those shifts clearly in their multimedia narration.

Students select 3–4 key scenes and plot them on a simple x–y graph: the x-axis marks each scene, and the y-axis shows tone intensity on a scale of 1–5. After choosing tone words (such as hopeful, tense, gloomy, or determined), students assign each scene an intensity level and connect the points to show how the tone rises, falls, or fluctuates.

They then write brief explanations for their choices—for example, why a tone becomes more tense during a conflict or softens during a moment of reflection.

This interdisciplinary activity strengthens close reading, vocabulary precision, and data representation skills. It also gives students a visual reference they can translate directly into their Book Creator narration when explaining how tone influences the character’s journey. You can access this activity here.

5. Theme Hashtags

Why this matters: Condensing a theme into a short, memorable phrase helps students clarify the lesson their character learns and prepares them to communicate that message in their final slide.

Students identify the message their character takes away from the story and create 3–5 theme hashtags (e.g., #HardTruthsHelpUsGrow, #ChoosingKindness, #RiseAfterFalling). For each hashtag, they write a brief explanation connecting it to the character’s actions or turning points. At least one hashtag is linked to a specific scene or quote to ensure evidence-based thinking.

These concise, creative statements become the anchor for their theme slide in Book Creator.

Moving Forward

As students create their multimedia presentations, the foundation is set. What we’ve designed reflects the kind of learning we want to cultivate: learning that values depth over recall, creativity over compliance, and voice over one-size-fits-all responses.

Performance-based assessments are not extras. They are intentional invitations for students to show who they are becoming as learners.

And in many ways, this work brings us back to the question that started it all: How can students show what they truly understand?

When assessment becomes learning, students don’t just complete a task. They discover something about themselves as readers, thinkers, and creators. They begin to see that their ideas matter, their interpretations matter, and their voice has a place in the work.

And that is the point. When we design assessments that honor student thinking, we are not just measuring growth. We are nurturing it.