Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: Middle School (6-8)

STEAM Games, Apps, and Sites

Common Sense is the largest independent nonprofit organization committed to helping kids, teachers, and families manage media and technology in life and learning. They provide ratings and reviews to apps, games, and website created by teachers and for teachers. The team of reviews at Common Sense has curated and reviewed a collection of STEAM games, […]

The Mathematics Common Core Toolbox

This toolbox is meant to support districts in their implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The Dana Center believes the new standards provide an opportunity for districts to move their students to higher levels of achievement. However, they also recognize the challenges districts face in meeting these rigorous standards. Thus they developed this […]

Colorado Assessment Review Tool

The Assessment Review Tool (ART) is intended for use in analyzing summative K-12 classroom assessments to determine their quality and efficacy, their suitability for use as student growth measures, and their alignment with the Colorado Academic Standards (CAS). With very minor modification the tool could be used to evaluate alignment to the Common Core State […]

Creating Text Dependent Questions for ELLs: Examples for 6th-8th Grade

This guidance document provides useful tips for constructing text-dependent questions (TDQs) for English language learners (ELLs). In this post from Colorin Colorado!, the authors created TDQs for a middle school informational text that is appropriate for ELLs. These TDQs are based on the authors’ previous work on adapting Achieve the Core’s TDQ guides and developing […]

Writing “Just Right” Research Questions: Strategies for ELLs

In this blog post, the author presents some instructional strategies to support English language learners (ELLs) at the middle school level as they work with an element of one of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) writing anchor standards, and concludes with some resources on writing for ELLs.