Preparing for PARCC - Blog Series Part V

Preparing for PARCC

Aligning English Language Arts Instructional Practices

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.

Regardless of how you feel about PARCC, or any standardized test, I think that in PARCC states we can all agree, at this moment it is necessary to prepare our students for the experience. And to be honest, I don’t think that preparing for PARCC is a waste of instruction time. PARCC is a test that evaluates students’ progress toward college and career readiness.  It is a test of our students’ competence regarding the Common Core State Standards. Therefore, when we are preparing students for PARCC we are applying and practicing the Common Core. That is what we are supposed to do.

But what does a fully aligned classroom look like?

“The PARCC assessments are aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and were created to measure students' ability to apply their knowledge of concepts rather than memorizing facts.”  (NJDOE)

 In English language arts (ELA), students will be required to:

• Closely read multiple passages
• Write essay responses in literary analysis, research tasks and narrative tasks

Close Reading

So what is close reading and how do we apply it in the classroom?

Characteristics of Close Reading

• Uncovers layers of meaning in a text
• Invites a careful reading of the text
• Requires a text to be read multiple times
• Requires that students be asked a range of text-dependent questions

Text-Dependent Questions

• Can only be answered with evidence from the text.
• Can be literal but must also involve analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
• Focus on word, sentence, and paragraph, as well as larger ideas, themes, or events.
• Focus on difficult portions of the text in order to enhance reading proficiency.
• Can also include prompts for writing and discussion questions.
• (achievethecore.com)

Applying Close Reading and Asking Text-Dependent Questions

One implication of conducting close reading and asking text-dependent questions is that classroom tasks should require students to provide both oral and written responses to questions about the text in which the answers are found within the text and are not based on prior knowledge, experience or opinion.

• Instructors should spend more time teaching students how to find evidence from the text.
• Instructors need to consider and create text-dependent questions before instruction.
• Instructors should attend professional development workshops to learn how to apply close reading strategies.

Literary Analysis Tasks

How do students complete LATs?

• Students carefully consider two literary texts worthy of close study.
• They are asked to answer a few EBSR and TECR questions about each text to demonstrate their ability to do close analytic reading and to compare and synthesize ideas.
• Students write a literary analysis about the two texts.

PARCC’s LATs and RSTs are a new and unusual writing task for both instructors and students.  But at the heart of a literary analysis task is the understanding that authors write for specific purposes. And the student’s thesis in a LAT is his/her perspective of the author’s choices that are supported with evidence from the text.  To assist students to write quality LATs they need to have a strong understanding of the elements of literature and an understanding of how to construct the essay.

Please view the blog, “6-Step Process for Writing LATs and RSTs” to learn how to assist your students to complete these essays. 

Some topics that instructors might want to focus on include:

• Elements of Literature
• Word Choice
• Genres
• Literary Devices 

Research Simulation Tasks

The other new and unusual writing task is the Research Simulation Task (RST).

How do students complete RSTs?

• Students begin by reading an anchor text that introduces the topic. 
• EBSR and TECR items ask students to gather key details about the passage to support their understanding.
• Students read one or two additional sources and answer a few questions about each text to learn more about the topic, so they are ready to write the final essay and to show their reading comprehension.
• Finally, students mirror the research process by synthesizing their understandings into a writing that uses textual evidence from the sources.

Some of the concepts that students will be asked to write about include:

• Main Idea and Supporting Details: Students read one text and identify main idea and supporting details
• Cause and Effect: Students read another text and identify the cause and effect
• Claim and Evidence: Students read another text and identify claim, supporting evidence and explanation

Instructors can help students to complete RSTs by:

• Familiarizing students with RST elements
• Building students’ skills related to evidence
• Helping students improve their writing skills 

Let’s talk about evidence. How do students select the best evidence to support their claim? Here are a couple of thought-provoking activities you can use in your classroom:

• Super Bowl or SuperChill?
• Develop an Argument with Facts
• Develop an Argument with Reasoning
• Composing a Counter Argument

Narrative Tasks

The narrative tasks on PARCC are the most familiar to our students.  

How do students complete the narrative tasks?

• Students read a literary text.
• Students answer EBSR or TECR items
• Students write a narrative story (PCR)

Some of the elements that students will need to hone in order to perform well on this task include:

• Point of view
• Developing strong voice
• Identifying mood, tone and voice

Students will also need to improve the quality of their essays:

• Show Don’t Tell
• Strong Character Development
• Improved Dialogue
• Powerful Language

Here are a couple of activities that instructors can use to enhance students understanding of the narrative task requirements:

• Character Development
• Plot Development
• Figurative Language

It is our sincerest wish that you find value in these ideas and resources and begin to integrate the concepts that students will experience on PARCC. Please let us know if we can help you make your classroom or school more fully aligned with the Common Core and PARCC.

Standards Solution and Inspired Instruction offers 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.

Preparing for PARCC - Blog Series Part III

Preparing for PARCC

Using PARCC Writing Rubrics to Inform Instruction – Part 2

Creating a Corrective Instruction Plan

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.

Last year, PARCC posted their writing rubrics for the Prose-Constructed Response (PCR) and then revised them this past July.

In the first post, we discussed how instructors can score their students’ essays by creating item-specific guides. And we stressed that the only reason we assess students is to identify their strengths and needs, which in turn enables us to provide corrective instruction. In this post, we’ll show you how to analyze students’ needs and create a corrective instruction plan to address these needs.

Analyzing Student Results

•      Use the Analyzing Student Essays form and identify your students’ needs.

•      Based upon your analysis, what is your class’s greatest need in relationship to constructing an on-demand LAT or RST?

•      Which students performed exceptionally well? What was special about their essays?

•      Which students displayed the greatest needs? What are their needs and how will you provide corrective instruction?

Consider Your Classes’ Needs

What did you discover when you reviewed your classes’ essays?  Below are some common needs:

•      Students answered the prompt, but wrote an open-ended question response instead of an essay.

•      Students did not write an introductory paragraph with a thesis statement.

•      Students’ essays lacked structure and organization.

•      Students did not respond to all parts of the PCR prompt.

•      Students provided evidence but did not link it to the reasons, topic sentences, and/or major claim.

•      Students did not finish in time.

Create a Corrective Instruction Plan

Use the Corrective Instruction Plan in this section. Based upon your findings, what activities will you implement to address each class’s greatest needs?  Moreover, what is your plan for providing assistance to individual students? Click on the links to access suggested activities.

•                     •      Deconstructing Essays

·                    •      Honing Understanding of Evidence

·                    •      Creating Advanced Arguments

·                    •      Creating Rubrics

·                    •      Selecting Literature

·                    •      Constructing PCRs

  

In this two-part blog, Using PARCC Rubrics, we learned:

·                   •      How to create item-specific guides

·                   •      How to score our students’ LAT and RST essays

·                   •      How to analyze our students’ results

·                   •      How to provide corrective instruction to address student needs

If you have any questions or comments about this content, please feel free to contact this blog’s author, Victoria Pagonis at victoria.pagonis@standardssolution.com.  She will be happy to help you make preparing for PARCC a meaningful learning experience.

Standards Solution and Inspired Instruction offers 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.

Preparing for PARCC - - Blog Series Part II

Preparing for PARCC

Using PARCC Writing Rubrics 

to Inform Instruction – Part 1

Scoring Student Essays

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.

Last year, PARCC posted their writing rubrics for the Prose-Constructed Response (PCR) and then revised them this past July. However, since each writing task is unique and the rubrics are generic, to make good use of these rubrics you must create item-specific guides that qualify the range of student responses.

You can create item-specific guides to score your students’ on-demand writing samples. These guides will give you an idea of which writing skills you should focus on to help students improve their writing.

First, we need a thorough understanding of PARCC’s generic rubrics, and then we must identify the item-specific information related to each prompt. There are three components to PARCC’s generic rubric: Reading Comprehension – Comprehension of Key Ideas and Details; Writing – Written Expression; and Writing – Knowledge of Language and Conventions. Below is a list of student expectations for each category.

Reading Comprehension

     •     Students must include evidence of understanding, including direct references and inferences.

     •     Students need to link perspective (“analysis”) to specific evidence.

Written Expression

•      Students must respond to all parts of the prompt.

•      Students must develop a claim or topic with reasons and textual evidence.

•      Students must write in the specified discipline (narrative, essay, etc.).

•      Students must write in a style and organization effective for the conventions of the discipline.

Written Conventions

•      Students must demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English.

•      Students need to write enough so that scorers can properly assess their command of standard English conventions.

The first step in creating the task-specific rubric is to survey your students’ essays. Task-specific rubrics are constructed using student responses and by identifying expected conditions for each category of the generic rubric. Use Standards Solution’s Item-Specific Considerations to set the expectations for each category.

Now that you have considered every element of the rubric, return to your students’ essays and use the rubric and your item specific guide to identify strengths and areas of need.

Scoring LATs and RSTs

For responses to the Literary Analysis Task and Research Simulation Task, three dimensions are scored for a total of 19 points (15 for grade 3).

•      Reading: worth up to 4 points

•      Written Expression: worth up to 12 points*

•      Knowledge of Language and Conventions: worth up to 3 points

*When determining the score for Written Expression, the scorer first determines the holistic score (4, 3, 2, 1, 0) based on which score point best describes that paper. Then that score (4, 3, 2, 1, 0) is multiplied by three. This means that only certain scores can be represented (12, 9, 6, 3, 0). This is true for both rubrics.

The Scoring Process

•      Use the rubric and your item specific guide to review each essay.

•      Score Reading Comprehension.

•      Consider the elements to Written Expression and score accordingly:

•      Did the student write an essay that addresses all parts of the prompt?

•      Did the student provide a claim with reasons and evidence?

•      Was the student’s essay organized and effective for the given genre?

•      Remember to consider the holistic nature of the essay when selecting point values for Written Expression and remember to multiply by three.

•      For the Writing – Knowledge of Language and Conventions category, points should only be deducted when the errors impede meaning.

Remember, the purpose of evaluating our students is to help them improve their abilities. In our next post, we’ll describe how to analyze your students’ needs and provide corrective instruction.

Standards Solution and Inspired Instruction offers 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.

Preparing for PARCC - Blog Series Part I

A Six-Step Process for Completing the LATs and RSTs

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.

In this article, we’ll explain our six-step process for responding to the Prose-Constructed Response (PCR) prompt on PARCC’s Literary Analysis Tasks and Research Simulation Tasks. Students who follow these steps will have a great advantage on tackling the essay questions in these tasks.

These steps are meant to be followed after the student has read the prompt and texts at least once.

Step 1: Consider the Prompt

           

Too many educators assume that students read a prompt and just know what it’s asking them to do. But PARCC’s writing prompts can be startlingly easy to misread if one isn’t careful. Students should be taught how to analyze the prompts and then state in their own words what the prompt is requiring of them.

For an example, read the PARCC prompt below. A student may read it and think that she is only identifying the authors’ arguments. However, what she’s really being asked to do is analyze the strength of the arguments.  

Step 2: Rewrite the Prompt as a Thesis Statement

Once the student understands what the prompt is asking her to write about, she is then ready to make a claim in the form of a thesis statement. A thesis statement can be constructed following a simple formula: Restate the main idea of the prompt and then state your position. In the example below, I restate the crux of the prompt and state my position:

Step 3: Gather Evidence

Next, the student has to gather evidence to support her position from—and only from—the text, not from personal experience or from life at large. The box below displays quotations that the student gathered as possible evidence. She won’t use all of it, but she wants to gather enough so that she has enough to choose from. Because the prompt requires the student to evaluate the strengths of the arguments in each text, the student should collect all the evidence that mentions Earhart’s bravery or demonstrates it by describing her actions. Based on the evidence collected, a student may notice that her original thesis needs to be modified.  

Step 4: Organize the Evidence and Construct the Outline

This step is most often the hardest. Writing a clear and organized essay is relatively straightforward when you have a good quality outline. Organizing your argument and evidence into a coherent whole is where the greatest challenge lies.

The outline should address each of the three major sections of an essay: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion.

Here’s a useful way to organize each body paragraph:

A. Topic Sentence

B. Support

C. Explanation

D. Support

E. Explanation

F. Summary

G. Transition

With this order, the student ensures that she introduces the topic of each paragraph, offers enough support (textual evidence) for her thesis, and justifies the use of each individual piece of evidence. Ideas for transitions and summaries can be jotted down too, but they can also be left for the writing stage, when it will be easier to articulate them once the ideas for the body paragraph are expressed.

Here is a sample with two body paragraphs. The student should aim for specificity and simplicity. Sophisticated language is best left for the revision stage.

Step 5: Write the Essay

Once students understand the format of PARCC’s LATs and RSTs, the majority of classroom instruction should focus on improving the quality of students’ writing. Instruction should begin with the requirements of the task, followed by Steps 1 to 4 above. Once students have mastered the essay construct, instructors can assist students to write strong transitions between paragraphs, to make better word choices, and to write conclusions that leave the reader thinking.

Step 6: Revise, Edit and Proofread

The last step should be taught using explicit directions. Instructors often tell students to revise and edit their essays but don’t explain what or how students should do so. One method that worked well for my students when I was a teacher was to give them an editing checklist, catered to the specific prompt the students were writing from. After students finish their drafts, direct them to go down the list and confirm that they have each item or add the items they don’t have.

Conclusion

Equipped with this six-step process, students will be able to craft clear and organized essays for the PARCC RST and LAT. Practice this process several times throughout the year, so that by testing time your students are clear on what steps they should take to complete the Prose-Constructed Response.

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.