Outcome: Participants Learn Strategies to Help Students Use Information from Reading Passages as Support for Conclusions and Arguments
Focus: Assessment
Audience: PK-12 Teachers
Description: The Pennsylvania Core Standards define text-dependent analysis, or “close reading,” as drawing evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. Beginning in 2015, PSSA questions began to move beyond general reading comprehension to requiring the use of text-dependent evidence. According to Student Achievement Partners, founded by four National Common Core State Standards lead writers (http://achievethecore.org/), good text-dependent analysis questions cause students to do at least one of the following:
- Analyze paragraphs on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and sentences on a word-by-word basis, to determine the role played by individual paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words
- Investigate how meaning can be altered by changing key words and why an author may have chosen one word over another
- Prove each argument in persuasive text, each idea in informational text, each key detail in literary text, and observe how these build to a whole
- Examine how shifts in the direction of an argument or explanation are achieved and the impact of those shifts
- Question why authors choose to begin and end when they do
- Note and assess patterns of writing and what they achieve
- Consider what the text leaves uncertain or unstated
Participants learn how to:
- Use the latest research about how the brain learns to read
- Select challenging and appropriate text
- Analyze the text’s content and language ahead of time
- Anticipate potential challenges the text may present for certain students
- Write text-dependent questions that engage students in interpretive tasks
- Lead rich and rigorous conversations, through the use of text-dependent questions, that keep students engaged with the text’s deeper meaning
- Ensure reading activities stay closely connected to the text
- Implement TDA-specific formative assessments to gather feedback
In this session, edInsight consultants:
- Visit Reading/ELA classrooms to demonstrate instructional practices
- Revisit, review, and reflect on classroom demonstrations with teachers
- Collaborate with teachers to implement the demonstrated practices
- Observe classroom instruction to assess implementation of practices
- Debrief observations and establish a protocol for continuing the TDA process