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.