6-12 ELA Common Core Resources

the Common Core State Standards offer a very different view of literacy, in which fluency and comprehension skills evolve together throughout every grade and subject in a student's academic life, from the first time a toddler gums a board book to the moment a medical student reads data from a brain scan.

the common-core literacy standards reflect the research world's changing evidence on expectations of student competence in an increasingly interconnected and digitized world. But critics say the standards also neglect emerging evidence on cognitive and reading strategies that could guide teachers on how to help students develop those literacy skills

We need to help children use literacy to develop critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

28997 28997 « Election Brings Changes to Polarized Texas School Board | Main Final College-Readiness Definition Guides Test Consortium By Catherine Gewertz on November 7, 2012 4:16 PM What does it mean to be college-ready? Half the states in the country have agreed on a definition. And that definition will shape the way student performance is judged in those states in a couple years. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, has approved a set of descriptors for the tests it's designing for the Common Core State Standards. They lay out how many levels of achievement there will be on the test, specify what level a student has to reach to be considered "college ready," and describe the level of expertise students must show to merit that title. The development of these descriptors is a key step in designing the tests that students in the 23 PARCC states will take in 2014-15. The other group of states working on similar tests, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, is working on descriptors of its own. To get a sense of the discussions that go into these decisions, read my report on a PARCC board meeting in June, when K-12 and higher education members of the consortium hashed out their differences. Then read the blog post I wrote in July, which discusses how they blended those differences into a new version of the descriptors. They opened that one up for more feedback, and the result is the final ones, which can be found on PARCC's website. A summary of public feedback shows how K-12 and higher ed. folks weighed in on a variety of topics. One was whether to assign names or numbers to the five levels of achievement on the test. Another was how to distinguish nuances in the meaning of the descriptions of students' skills at the various levels. At exactly what point, for instance, does a student's command of the subject move from "superior" to "solid," from "solid" to "partial," from "partial" to "limited," and from "limited" to "very limited?" These are the kinds of discussions that characterize the work on this stuff. As you can see from the final documents, PARCC's policy will be that students earn the "college readiness" determination by performing at level 4 on a 5-level test. Reaching that level on the language arts part of the exam will mean that students have "demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills, and practices necessary" to skip remedial classes and go directly into entry-level, credit-bearing courses in "college English composition, literature, and technical courses requiring college-level reading and writing." Scoring at level 4 in math allows students to enroll directly in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in algebra, introductory statistics, and "technical courses requiring an equivalent level" of math. The PARCC policy says that college-readiness scores on the test will be set in such a way that students who score at that

The PARCC policy says that college-readiness scores on the test will be set in such a way that students who score at that level—level 4—will have a 75 percent chance of earning a grade of C or better in those college courses.

Acknowledging a sensitive area in the discussion of college readiness, the policy notes that the skills sought in the tests are only the "academic" ones necessary for college success, not the entire spectrum of skills necessary, such as persistence or motivation.

English Language Arts The text is more complex.

Since the 1960s, text difficulty in textbooks has been declining (Source: CCSS Appendix A)

has created a significant gap between what students are reading in twelfth grade and what is expected of them when they arrive at college.

For years, Morse noted, schools have been using software that scores students’ essays automatically using artificial intelligence technology, which allows students to practice writing and get constructive feedback more frequently than if teachers had to score all drafts by hand.

But these solutions “still must be grounded in sound pedagogy,” he said, “and that’s not easy.”

To address this need, AcademicMerit created FineTune, which it calls a first-of-its-kind online professional development tool for supporting teachers in the rubric-based evaluation of student writing.

When young readers encounter texts that contain too many unfamiliar words, their comprehension suffers.

vocabulary knowledge is a key element in reading comprehension. To comprehend fully and learn well, all students need regular vocabulary exploration.

the term exploration does not accurately describe most traditional word study in schools.