Creating PARCC-Like English Assessments – Part 1 EBSRs
This post is part of our blog
series on PARCC. In this series, we offer tips and strategies you can use to
ensure that your students perform at their very best on the PARCC tests.
One way to assist students to perform at their personal best
is to simulate the test-taking experience, both in terms of the test content
and the testing conditions. This two-part blog post covers how to create a PARCC-like
English assessment. In Part 1, we’ll address how to select a text, how to
identify what is special or unique about the text, and how to write
Evidence-Based Selected Response (EBSR) items. In Part 2, we’ll explain the
Technology-Enhanced Constructed Response (TECR) items and provide templates for
creating these items.
What is an EBSR?
An EBSR is a
two-part question (Part A and Part B).
“The term refers to a type of ELA/literacy test item that asks students
to show the evidence in a text that led them to a previous answer.” (parcconline.org)
An EBSR assesses
vocabulary knowledge, elements of literature, main ideas, key details,
structure, or integration of ideas.
In order to create an assessment, we have to identify what
PARCC calls “texts worth reading.” Let’s look at how PARCC determines if a text
is worthy of study.
Five PARCC Criteria for Selecting Texts Worth Reading:
“Texts Are Complex: PARCC assessments follow the staircase of text
complexity in the CCSS to ensure assessments track student progress each year
towards college and career readiness.
Texts Are Diverse: PARCC texts stem from across the disciplines
(e.g. ELA, history, science and technical subjects), are written by authors
with diverse backgrounds, reflect the CCSS prescribed balances of literature
and informational text, and appeal to a wide range of student audiences.
Texts Are Authentic: PARCC texts are authentic works of
exceptional craft and/or rich repositories of ideas and information rather than
commissioned-for-the-test passages lacking sufficient evidence, organization,
and style.
Texts Are Paired Effectively: PARCC text pairings, where required by the
CCSS, have meaningful and significant points of comparison that invite
questions beyond superficial observations.
Texts Meet Demands of Bias and
Sensitivity Guidelines: PARCC texts
are carefully vetted to ensure that while they pique student interest and
appeal to a wide audience they avoid highly controversial topics that may be
troublesome to students.”
Now, let’s complete
the following four steps to create your first EBSR item.
Step #1 – Consider Your Text
Once you have selected
your text, you have to think about what is special or unique about the text. Take
a look at your text. With the understanding that text complexity is important
and students should continually be exposed to increasingly complex text,
determine which sections or passages may be difficult for students. Here is a sample for you to consider.
OK, so now we’re ready to create text-dependent questions. Read
what PARCC has to say about text-dependent
questions:
“Good text dependent questions will often linger over specific phrases
and sentences to ensure careful comprehension of the text—they help students
see something worthwhile that they would not have seen on a more cursory
reading.
An effective set of text dependent questions delves systematically into a
text to guide students in extracting the key meanings or ideas found there.
They typically begin by exploring specific words, details, and arguments
and then move on to examine the impact of those specifics on the text as a whole.
Along the way they target academic vocabulary and specific sentence
structures as critical focus points for gaining comprehension.”
Step #2 – Identify
What You Want to Assess
Now that you know what is special about your text, what do
you want to assess? PARCC created Reading Evidence Tables for Kindergarten
through grade 11. Take a look at your grade level’s document.
PARCC Reading Evidence Tables (Scroll about halfway down the page to see
the list of evidence tables.)
Using your grade level’s
table, identify passages in the text that can be used to assess the evidences
to be measured by your test item.
Step #3 – Construct Part
A of Your EBSR
Think about PARCC’s
Item Guidelines listed below and use our template to construct Part A of your
EBSR.
Constructing Distractors – Part A
ü “The
primary purpose of a distractor is to provide evidence that a student is not
able to meet the standard(s) assessed due to student misconceptions.
ü Distractors
must be plausible responses to item stems.
ü Items
should not use negative distractors.
ü The
written style of all distractors in an item should be similar to that of the
correct response(s).
ü Answer
responses (distractors) are not ordered alphabetically by first word or by
short to long, etc. the answers in the order they appear in the passage.”
(PARCC - Item Guidelines for ELA/Literacy
PARCC Summative Assessment- Best Practices for Distractors for EBSR items)
Step #4 – Construct Part
B of Your EBSR
Follow these PARCC guidelines for creating Part B:
ü
“In Part
B, when writing the distractors for evidences, all of the answer choices must
be the same type of citation of evidence (e.g. all quotes or all paraphrases).
ü
Particular
care must be taken for Part B items, where students are asked to select evidence
from the text such that distractor wording to achieve parallelism in style does
not overly impose distractor wording.
ü
All
answer choices for Part B must be accurate/relevant/from the passage.”
(PARCC - Item Guidelines for ELA/Literacy
PARCC Summative Assessment- Best Practices for Distractors for EBSR items)
There you have it! You constructed the first EBSR for your
PARCC-like assessment. Standards Solution’s president, Victoria Pagonis, would be
happy to review your work. Email your EBSR to victoria.pagonis@standardssolution.com
along with the text, your reason for choosing that text, and the standards that
you wish to assess with the item. She’ll reply with feedback and suggestions for
improvement.
Let’s review. To create a PARCC-like English assessment with
Evidence-Based Selected Responses, you have to:
- Select a text worthy of close study via a comprehensive analysis of the text.
- Identify specifically what you want to assess with a comparison of the reading evidence docs AND what is special and unique in the text.
- Create EBSRs that have quality distractors.
Standards Solution and Inspired Instruction offer 540 PARCC lesson plans, online PARCC-like assessments with technology-enhanced items, PARCC workshops, and PARCC demonstration lessons. Please contact Judy Cataldi for more information:
Judy.cataldi@standardssolution.com or call 908-223-7202.
Standards Solution Holding, LLC is not owned by or affiliated in any fashion with PARCC, Inc.
