Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/116561
Common Core Standards: Text Complexity The Common Core State Standards are the first to require text complexity as a specific standard: "Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently." When choosing texts for instruction and assessment at any grade level, educators should consider three dimensions of text complexity: 1.Use quantitative measures to assign a text to a grade band. 2.Use qualitative measures to locate a text within a specific grade band. 3.Use professional judgment to decide how suited a text is for a specific instructional purpose with a particular set of students. Text-Dependent Questions: What Are They? The Common Core State Standards for reading strongly focus on students gathering evidence, knowledge, and insight from what they read. Indeed, 80 to 90 percent of the reading Standards in each grade require text-dependent analysis; accordingly, aligned curriculum materials should have a similar percentage of textdependent questions. As the name suggests, a text-dependent question specifically asks a question that can only be answered by referring explicitly back to the text being read. It does not rely on any particular background information extraneous to the text nor depend on students having other experiences or knowledge; instead it privileges the text itself and what students can extract from what is before them. For example, in a close analytic reading of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," the following would not be text-dependent questions: •Why did the North fight the civil war? •Have you ever been to a funeral or gravesite? •Lincoln says that the nation is dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." Why is equality an important value to promote? The overarching problem with these questions is that they require no familiarity at all with Lincoln's speech to answer them. Responding to these sorts of questions instead requires students to go outside the text. Such questions can be tempting to ask because they Summer.13advo.indd 11 are likely to get students talking, but they take students away from considering the actual point Lincoln is making. They seek to elicit a personal or general response that relies on individual experience and opinion, and answering them will not move students closer to understanding the text of the "Gettysburg Address." 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. Typical text dependent questions ask students to perform one or more of the following tasks: •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. •Probe 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. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Continued on next page AEA Advocate x Summer 2013 11 3/18/13 12:03 PM