Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: Middle School (6-8)

Close Reading Text Cover Sheet

The Text Cover Sheet provides a space for teachers to analyze a text, then identify and record for instructional purposes (1) the standards addressed; (2) reading purposes and text content; and (3) text and language challenges and connections. It accompanies the resource Supporting Students in Close Reading. As a Word version, teachers can fill it out electronically.

Selecting Text tool

The Selecting Text Tool, also found in the close reading resource, guides teachers in the process of selecting texts that provide appropriate levels of challenge for their students. Factors to consider include: age appropriateness, student interest level, complexity of ideas, text and sentence structure, vocabulary difficulty, and length of the text. For more detailed information, […]

Introduction to Functions Lesson Plan Revision

This is an excerpt of a Grade 8 mathematics lesson plan revision. The teacher valued the conceptual soundness of the lesson, but wanted to insert additional elements of formative assessment, such as adding tasks that allowed students to provide feedback to each other.  For more information on lesson revision with formative assessment, see this resource and […]

Why Do Fireflies Glow?

This lesson is part of a larger science unit on chemical reactions. The lesson incorporates English language arts with science content and features formative assessment. For the full set of science and ELA lesson plans, visit this collection on model lesson plans.

Evidence-Centered Design: A Summary

In this brief, Herman and Linn define evidence-centered design (ECD) and its relationship to PARCC and Smarter Balanced consortia assessments. ECD is a principled approach with interrelated stages for assessment development and validation. The main purpose for ECD is to support a close correspondence between the claims about student performance that a test is designed […]

Formative Assessment for Next Generation Science Standards: A Proposed Model

In this paper, the author proposes a conceptual model for the design and implementation of formative assessment to support the learning goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. The paper includes a review of the literature on formative assessment practices and describes how the literatures justify a proposed model. The paper also discusses considerations for the model’s application to the Next […]