Leadership | Burkins & Yaris

April Favorites 2013

May 6, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

We know we are a week into May, but we are just now finding a minute to reflect on our April posts! One highlight of last month was our trip to San Antonio where we facilitated a pre-conference institute with a wonderful group of colleagues who made the day fun for all of us. In April, we wrote about questioning and test preparation and, as usual, we were a bit unorthodox. Our favorite post was the April Fool’s Day post. Your favorite posts are listed below, dear Readers!

1. Top Ten Themes of the IRA Convention 2013

This post lists the themes we saw running across this years national convention. Every year is seems that everyone is sort of saying the same thing and this year was no exception. If you didn’t make it to the convention, this list can bring you up to speed.

2. Fitting it all In: “Finding Time” for Close Readings
This post revisits definitions “close reading” and considers it in the context of a literacy block. We argue that you don’t have to “make time” for close reading, but can integrate it into existing structures, such as read aloud, shared reading, and independent reading.

3. Getting to know you: The Three Stages of Reading the Standards
In this post, we liken getting to know the Common Core Standards to getting to know a person. We discuss how at first our relationship is driven by our first impression and then as new understandings reveal themselves, our understanding changes.

With 63 tweets, our “Top Ten Themes of IRA Convention 2013″ was our most-tweeted post, with Fitting it All In running a close second.

Filed Under: Academic Vocabulary, Alignment, Assessment, background knowledge, balance, Close Reads, Collaboration, College and Career Ready, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, complex text, Comprehension Strategies, Creativity, Educational Reform, Friday Favorite, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Growth Mindset, Guest post, Guided Reading, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Intervention, Leadership, Literacy Block, Literary Text, Main Idea, Musings, Planning for Instruction, Policy and Research, pre-reading strategies, publishers, Read Aloud, Reading, Reading in the Content Areas, Reflections, Research, Reviews, RTI, Shared Reading, Small Group Reading Instruction, Speaking and Listening, Staircase of Complexity, Standardized Testing, Test Prep, Text Based Questions, Text Complexity, text selection, Thursday Thought, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: April 2013, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, FAVORITES, Fitting it All In, IRA convention 2013, pre-conference institute, questioning, San Antonio, standardized testing, test prep

Hope and the Common Core

February 25, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 2 Comments

When people ask us if we think the Common Core State Standards are good or bad, we say, “Neither. It’s complicated.” This means we actually agree and disagree with just about everyone’s opinions on the standards. Burkins & Yaris neither sets out to endorse the Common Core nor to impede them. With this blog, we simply want to support practitioners who are implementing the Common Core, so that educators and the students with whom they work can utilize strategies for maximizing the excellent dimensions of the standards and managing the parts that are confusing or in conflict with their instructional beliefs.

This effort is not, however, towards coloring within the lines or towards figuring out how not to get in trouble. Our ultimate goal is to support joyful teaching and joyful learning, and to help you make sure you can sleep at night. We want to support educators as they figure out not only how to “get the standards done,” a worthwhile goal, but also how to enjoy it, even a lot. All the while, we intend toward making it easier for you to keep your sites set beyond standardized tests.

If we educator-explorers can traverse the rhetorical landscape, standing against the shifting winds of extreme views, and set up our bivouac (a tier 3 word we learned from Annie Dillard) in a place of balance and practicality, then we are more likely to move through this historical initiative in ways that are beneficial for children. It is okay for us to bend, lean hard with the wind, or even to set up a temporary camp; but eventually we must think practically about where we are and where we want to go in order to figure out how we live happily in this place that is at once familiar and new.

Interpreting the Common Core requires teaching differently. But this is an opportunity, despite the idiosyncratic combination of newness and familiarity that defines an encounter with the Common Core and, of course, complicates our writing efforts. Knowing when to think less, plan less, and study less in order to actually write is the defining challenge of most writing projects. With this blog, our writing demons are aided by the unending waves of new information perpetually written about the Common Core.

The biggest challenge seems to be being “Common Core” enough. Because our intention has always been towards balance, we find ourselves on both sides of most arguments. Thus, we are at once, too Common Core and not Common Core enough. Oddly enough, this reminds us of President Obama, who is at once charged with being too Black and not Black enough. Whether discussing governmental politics or educational policies, “Hope” is sometimes an act of will. Courage, friends!

Filed Under: balance, Educational Reform, Implementation, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Musings, Planning for Instruction, Policy and Research, Reflections, Reviews, Standardized Testing Tagged With: alignment, Annie Dillard, bias, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, educational policy, hope, Reflections

When is More Less?

February 4, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 2 Comments

In conversations with our readers, people have shared with us that they have often wondered how we maintain such a rigorous writing schedule being that their days barely allow them the time it takes to read our daily posts. We, too, feel this pressure of time and while there are many days that we scramble to meet our deadline and wish that we could commit time to other projects and facets of our lives, we soldier on because this blog has become something of a labor of love. That said, we have come to realize that in producing two hundred sixty something articles, there is much content that busy educators or new readers might have missed. Over the next few days, we will make an effort to curate some of our work. Our goal for looking back over our earlier posts is twofold: 1. We hope to recognize themes and notice places where we might be a little off balance and 2. We hope to make it easier for readers to access some of our earlier, but still relevant material.

Once again, it is our hope that you as you journey back through this year of writing, you share your thoughts about what we have written and about what you’d like us to write more.

Balancing Acts

We love when opportunities arise that allow us to talk face-to-face with our readers. Hearing feedback about this blog helps us to keep our work in perspective and to reflect on topics that we we may need to revisit. As we’ve been speaking with some of our readers, it’s come to our attention that our writing has been interpreted by some as opposed to the Common Core while others see us as hardcore proponents of the Common Core. This paradox constantly makes us want to revisit the biggest theme of our work: balance.

We began this writing journey nearly a year ago. One of the first articles we wrote was one titled, What Can We Learn from ‘Close Reads’ of the Common Core. In this post, we presented two polarized perspectives of the Common Core, one that viewed the standards as “a gift for educators and students” and a second that presented them “as a straight jacket for educators and students.” In this post, we quoted the Buddhist proverb, “Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise” to reflect our position which views the standards as something neither “completely horrible, completely fabulous, nor so-so.” In this post, we set out to be “thoughtful practitioners who read these documents thoroughly with a mind toward what is inherently wise and what is limited in the standards.”

In April, we circled back around to this topic of balance in our post titled Poetic Detour. As we neared the end of our weeklong celebration of poetry, we looked at poetry as “a metaphor for thinking and living creatively.” We discussed the difficult position that the standards present to teachers working to understand them well enough to implement them. We noted that our explorations of the Common Core needed to be “positive and fair” without being “naive” and urged teachers to “maintain balance between whatever competing forces are working within our heads.”

When we began our exploration of the Common Core, we committed to keeping our own tendencies to “find the parts we like, the standards with which we agree…and emphasize these parts,” in check. (from Seeing the Common Core in Our Own Image) As we look back over our posts, we recognize places and times where we have veered from that ideal leaving the occasional reader to see us as either Common Core lovers or haters. And as we began by saying, we appreciate the feedback that you provide that makes us check in with ourselves to make sure that we honor the one thing we value most on this journey: Balance.

As we near our first year anniversary, we’d like to recommit ourselves to our mission of maintaining a balanced perspective as we read, write, and think about the Common Core standards. We hope that you help us work toward this goal by continuing to provide your thoughtful feedback and ideas!

Filed Under: Alignment, balance, Common Core State Standards, Complete Literacy, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Reflections Tagged With: balance, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, digest, less is more, literacy instruction, Reflection

What Martin Luther King Jr. Says About the Common Core

January 21, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 3 Comments

Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is front and center in discussions of the Common Core State Standards, because the letter served as the text for the lesson demonstration that David Coleman offers to illustrate close reading.

But we see another connection, one which we have been discussing of late. One idea that Dr. King worked to convey, both in this letter and throughout the rest of the Civil Rights Movement, was that the Movement wasn’t just for African Americans. Ending segregation and other forms of systemic racism, he argued, would be better for everyone. Ultimately, this was one of the most powerful tenets of his message, and one that demonstrates his brilliance.

We’ve been thinking about standardized testing and how it seems to have gone amok in education. We could embrace the standards much more easily if they weren’t packaged with the guarantee of excessive testing. We have wondered, how does one interrupt the testing cycle in a country where testing is big business?

Our recent thought is that we have to help educators understand that testing isn’t a problem just for schools, teachers, and students labeled as failures. Testing hurts all schools, all teachers, all students. It reduces instructional time, condenses content to discrete information, minimizes higher-order thinking skills, and leads schools and students who perform well on them to narrow their definitions of success.

So, as we approach the standardized testing season in many school districts, consider how you will handle high test scores, because that will be your moment of influence. What if, instead of accepting those accolades and making speeches at “blue ribbon” banquets, school and district administrators said, we reject this label of our students. The testing system is too flawed and we have betters ways of evaluating what our students know.

If those who struggle with performance on tests are the only schools and teachers who speak against testing, it sounds as though they are making excuses. We need those who have high scores to let people know that they think the testing system is flawed, that it interferes with learning, and that it may not measure what everyone thinks it measures.

In closing, we return to Dr. King’s letter and recognize how universal and timeless it is. The lines below were pulled from the third paragraph of the letter:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

While they were penned decades ago, these words offer uncanny insight into American education’s testing predicament. Oh, the irony, Mr. Coleman. Oh, the irony.

Filed Under: Assessment, Close Reads, Common Core State Standards, complex text, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Musings, Policy and Research, publishers, Reflections, Research, Standardized Testing, Text Complexity, text selection, Uncategorized Tagged With: Assessment, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, David Coleman, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, standardized testing

Working Smarter, not Harder: 3 Ways to Collaborate Around the Common Core (Part 2)

January 17, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

Yesterday we explored the idea of collaborating with colleagues as you develop lessons. We grappled with the idea that, while true collaboration will undoubtedly improve your lessons, it may not always be possible given time constraints. As promised, today we offer you three ideas for collaborating around lesson development that won’t break your time bank. They can stand alone or work together as a sequence of three collaborative events.

1. Get together once or twice a month to explore children’s books together.
Have everyone bring in their favorite picture books, including narrative fiction, narrative non-fiction, and informational texts. If your grade has a particular topic around which you need to develop lessons, bring books related to that topic. Don’t bring every book you can find that tangentially relates to the topic; bring only great books that will give your students something about which to think. Then share them with each other. We suggest you meet off campus so you can serve wine.

2. If your grade-level team is going to use a common book, get together and talk about its big ideas.

Start by reading the book several times if it is a picture book. If it is a chapter book, read it at least twice before you meet. (Note: If this does not sound good to you, get over it. We mean this in the kindest way! We are asking students to read closely and we can’t expect to teach what we aren’t practicing. Rereading is the cornerstone of close reading, so dig in.) If you think about the text as you are reading and rereading, you may be surprised what you notice on a second read. If you don’t notice anything, either you aren’t reading closely or you need a better text.

Once you have read and, at least, reread the book, talk about it at length with your colleagues. What is the big idea of the text, in your opinion? How do you know? Where does the text, which includes illustrations, back up your opinion? These conversations should mirror the kinds of conversations you would have in a book club. We suggest you serve wine, again. And, perhaps, pie of some sort.

3. If you already have a book for which you all agree on a theme or big idea, then get together to think about how to support students in understanding it.

What questions can help students think about the deepest meanings of the text? How will you help them understand without spoon feeding them? We suggest that you pepper your questions with “generic” questions that will keep you from over-scaffolding and keep them really thinking. Questions such as, “What do you notice about this book?” or “Why do you think the author wrote this book?” can keep us from doing all the work. While we are writing questions to nudge them towards a theme we think is important, we have to make room for students to arrive at other themes. Certainly, as you work on both broad and more specific questions about your text, you will find the work easier and the questions better if you collaborate with knowing others. We don’t think a little wine will hurt either. And some pie, of course.

Filed Under: Close Reads, Collaboration, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Planning for Instruction Tagged With: CCSS, collaboration, Common Core State Standards, lesson planning, lesson plans, reading lessons

Working Smarter, not Harder: 3 Ways to Collaborate Around the Common Core (Part 1)

January 16, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris Leave a Comment

We’ve all worked in or with grade-level teams with the intent of eliminating redundant work. Why does each teacher on a grade-level write his/her own set of lesson plans for each week? Why don’t we collaborate more?

If you’ve ever tried to develop lessons with colleagues, however, you know the truth: It’s harder than one would think. If we divide up the lesson development work for a given week, it ends up disconnected and fragmented, because good planning considers the big picture. You can’t consider the cohesiveness of the whole week if you are only planning the writing lessons, while science, math, read aloud, etc. are divided among others. Plus, pieces get lost in translation when you try to implement the lesson plans someone else has written.

On the other hand, it does seem silly for every teacher to plan a complete set of lessons for every week.

Before, During, and After

To make collaborative planning really work in ways that are actually collaborative vs. simply distributing the labor, you actually have to meet and collaboratively sketch out the week before planning, divide up to write the lessons during the planning, and then meet again after planning your part for the week to make sure all the lesson pieces are connected. Such planning can lead to much better lessons, but it doesn’t illustrate the “Work smarter, not harder” adage. This structure is better described as, “Work harder and smarter.”

Alternatives
Collaboration around planning lessons related to the Common Core, still requires the time demands of thinking together. While such collegial effort is ideal, it isn’t always possible in the real worlds in which we live. With the Common Core, however, we think there are some places for collaboration that offer a middle ground that lightens the load of writing all your lessons alone without collaborating exhaustively. This is not to say, however, that we think such complete collaboration is a bad idea. On the contrary, we think it is the very best idea. Nevertheless, for those weeks when you just can’t pull off deep collaboration, or if you are dipping your toes into Common Core work while maintaining other planning, tomorrow we offer you three points of collaboration that will make your Common Core lessons better without extensive meetings.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Common Core State Standards, Educational Reform, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Planning for Instruction Tagged With: collaborative planning, Common Core State Standards, planning for instruction, reading lessons

Climbing the Staircase of Complexity: The Research and the Reality (Part 2)

January 15, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 5 Comments

In yesterday’s post, we explored the research that is the basis for the staircase of complexity. Today, we take this lofty paradigm and consider how it translates into classrooms. In particular, we are concerned that the term staircase implies a neatness that is not really indicative of the way people learn. While yesterday’s post was long and dense with ideas, today we offer you fewer words and more visuals. This post represents a shift in the way we picture students climbing the staircase of complexity.

Most of us have interpreted the way students “climb” the staircase of complexity, or the ways they ascend through levels of more difficult text, as very sequential, categorical, and linear. Such climbing is represented by the pictures above and below, which show climbers bounding straight up the stairs. These images communicate a metaphor that works to help us understand the ways students need to ascend text levels to be ready for college and career. Sort of.

The problem is that these images and the metaphor they represent are too tidy. Learning to negotiate text requires a set of skills that translates across text levels; what is likely to change across texts is the sentence structure, the text structure, and the vocabulary, among other things. So figuring out a harder text, often means spending time in easier text to build vocabulary. Or, one might move up and down text levels depending on the scaffolding of teachers. Also, as students stretch into new text demands they will likely experience a period where their new learning is settling down, a time where they are not consistent with exhibiting the new strategies. This means that they may handle a more difficult text on one day and then have trouble with a similar text on another day. Furthermore, introductions to a harder level of text may begin with shared reading, while guided reading remains in easier texts.

Basically, we think that climbing the staircase of complexity looks more like this:

Note: We thought before we chose to use this video clip because of the portrayals of African Americans. We are not endorsing such representations or making light of them. We decided, however, that Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s grace and skill can speak for itself and deserves to be shared.

*Don’t forget that our webinar, Close Reads and the Common Core is tomorrow at 4:30 EST. We hope you can join us!

Filed Under: Close Reads, Common Core State Standards, complex text, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Planning for Instruction, Staircase of Complexity, Text Complexity, text selection Tagged With: Bill Bojangles Robinson, CCSS, climbing the staircase, Common Core State Standards, complex text, staircase of complexity

Climbing the Staircase of Complexity: The Research and the Reality (Part 1)

January 14, 2013 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 6 Comments

Today we launch a two-part series exploring the research and ideas behind the “staircase of complexity.” To begin, we want to introduce a vernacular that we use as we consider a piece of CCSS research. For us, we put a piece of research into one of three categories: What?, Why?, and How?

“What? research” identifies what the authors of the CCSS feel is wrong in K-12 education, arriving at a problem statement, or the reason we might need a particular standard. “Why? research,” presents hypotheses for explaining why the problem exists. Finally, “How? Research” offers evidence of how a problem might (or might not) be solved, which generally translates into an anchor standard or a related, grade-specific standard.

Each of these categories of research played an important role in the development of the CCSS, and each holds specific limitations. Today, we explore a key study behind the idea of the staircase of complexity, “Aligning the Journey with the Destination: A Model for K-16 Reading Standards” (Williamson; 2006; MetaMetrics, Inc.). This study is both referenced directly in multiple documents and parts of the study are mentioned (without specific reference to the title or author) repeatedly. If you have watched any of the videos on EngageNY, you have heard David Coleman, the “architect and co-author of the standards (p. 2)” say something like:

…the standards must be college and career ready. They must from kindergarten through 12th grade create a staircase for college and career readiness….But the crucial design principle that informed our work is that we had to build a staircase that kids could follow. (p.4)

Such language connects directly to this MetaMetrics, Inc. study.

Two themes are repeated across CCSS videos, written transcripts, PowerPoints, and the standards documents. If you have experienced any kind of orientation to the CCSS, you have likely heard these:

Current high school graduates are not ready for college and career.
We have to figure out what graduates should be able to read to be successful in college and career and work backwards grade-by-grade to figure out what kindergarteners need to read.

The MetaMetrics, Inc. document addresses both of these issues and uses a lot of the language you will hear consistently in the CCSS videos, etc. This document seems to form the backbone of the third of the six shifts, or the shift in “text complexity,” which understandably arouses much interest from educators. So if you don’t read any other piece of research behind the CCSS, read this one.

A Close Reading of the MetaMetrics, Inc. Study
In the following paragraphs, we present specific quotes from the MetaMetrics study and then offer some commentary. Throughout this section, our thoughts are the non-italicized portions and follow each italicized quote from the article.

p.1: Two threads of recent research provide one possible way of developing and aligning (or at least informing the discussion about) student achievement standards for K-16.

The phrases “one possible way” and “at least informing” seem to imply the author’s reservations about making big decisions based on this research.

pp. 1-2: First, Williamson (2006a) elaborated a continuum of text demands for postsecondary endeavors. His work demonstrated substantial differences between the materials that high school students are expected to read and the materials they may encounter after high school….Secondly, Williamson, Thompson and Baker (2006b) described actual growth in reading ability for five successive cohorts of students who were followed longitudinally for six years.

Williamson is referring to himself and colleagues in this quote. You will notice that the two studies mentioned align to the two threads of research mentioned in the introduction of this blog, and to the two, aforementioned, key ideas that are pervasive in the CCSS. The two Williamson studies (2006a, 2006b) offer us an analysis of the text demands for college and career reading and a year-by-year trajectory of student reading growth. These studies are referenced and linked at the bottom of this article.

p. 2: These two sources of information might be used in concert to effect growth standards that are coordinated across the K-16 timeframe.

In terms of the first study (2006a), Williamson evaluated the text level of an array of postsecondary reading materials: undergraduate admissions tests, military materials, workplace materials (an independent analysis of over 1400 different workplace reading samples), community college and university texts, and citizenship materials.

p. 2: A key feature of these two sets of results is the fact that both the readability of the texts and the students’ reading ability are measured with the same scale, The Lexile Framework for Reading. The Lexile scale is the only known scale that allows both text and reader measures to be made on the same developmental scale. This is critical, because it is what makes it possible to combine both analyses in the same picture for K-16.

Basically, Williamson seems to be describing the heart of the CCSS, college and career readiness defined by postsecondary text levels, with analysis of student reading levels articulated as benchmarks for reaching college and career readiness goals. Williamson explains that combining these two studies is only possible because Lexiles® are designed to measure both the text levels in the first study and the student reading levels in the second study, hence allowing a seamless alignment between the two. It is worth mentioning that MetaMetrics owns Lexiles.

p. 3: We will focus on a cohort of 67,908 North Carolina public school students who were third graders in 1999 and who progressed to the eighth grade by 2004. These students remained within North Carolina Schools for all six years and had complete histories of reading achievement data….The growth in reading ability of these students from the end of third grade to the end of eighth grade is well described by a quadratic growth curve, depicted in figure 1.

It is important to note that the data in this study does not include any data for k-2 or 9-12 students. Wikipedia offers this simple definition definition of a quadratic growth curve (not to suggest that quadratic growth curves are simple) : “In plain and simple English, quadratic growth is growth where the rate of change changes at a constant rate. For example, if you add 3 the first time, then you add 3.5 the next time, and 4 the time after that, that is quadratic growth. In this case, you added 0.5 to your rate of change each time.” Thus, the study by MetaMetrics suggests a consistent rate of change as you move up grade-levels from Kindergarten through grade twelve.

p.3: Extrapolated K-12 Growth Curve with Media Postsecondary Text Measures (header)

This is the header for the section that estimates K-2 and 9-12 student reading levels based on the 3-8 data. As we mentioned before, there was no data for K-2 or 9-12.

p. 3: The curve in figure 1 was estimated with an advanced statistical technique called multilevel modeling….with some caution, the quadratic equation that characterizes the curve through the range of observed data might be used to estimate [emphasis added] average performance before third grade and after eighth grade.

Williamson explains that there is a statistical technique that lets a researcher estimate data points where none were available, i.e. in this case, K-3 and 9-12.

p.3: It is important to note that this is a risky procedure, for at least two reasons. First, there are no actual data to check our assumption that growth from grades K-2 and grades 9-12 can be described by the same quadratic equation that describes growth from grades 3-8.

As far as the first concern, how does one respond to a statement that there is “no actual data?” , particular when this non-data has formed the basis of a big idea influencing instructional decisions across the country. The second concern is a statistical one, that appears to be moot. We are by no means experts in quadratic equations!

p.5: The farther one goes from the observed data (grades 3-8), the more one has to bear in mind the provisional nature of the projections.

This is saying that the extrapolation to kindergarten and to twelfth grade are less likely to be accurate than those in second and fourth grades, simply because the third-grade estimates are the farthest away from the actual data, etc.

p. 6: Since the growth curve expresses student performance as a function of grade, it lays out a path (also conveying expectations, potential standards) for academic growth throughout the entire K-12 experience….This approach produces information that is potentially useful to educational leaders and policy makers who face the challenge of creating better alignment between the K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions of higher education in the United States.

This seems to be a basic summary of the CCSS.

Conclusions
We have not read the original two studies from Williamson, but the citations are at the end of this article. We assume that there is a more detailed version of this study in existence, as one could hardly capture the data for thousands of students in just six pages.

There are some interesting pieces to this study, and the sample size is compelling. Nevertheless, the use of one study, much less one study that engages a “risky” procedure to extrapolate in lieu of actual data, seems a questionable foundation for the staircase of complexity. While other research informs the development of the staircase, this is the only study that considers the actual connectedness across grades and the idea of beginning with the end in mind, ideas which appear to have no research behind them.

We categorize this study as “How?” research, because it informs the actual implementation of the CCSS and the development of the standards.

Disclaimers:

1. We are not saying that letting your students read more complex text is a bad idea. We think that engaging them in text that make them think more is a good idea. We just question the neatness of the the staircase of complexity and implications that this staircase is based on solid science.

2. We make mistakes. If we have misread some portion of this study or have overlooked a piece of research, please let us know! We count on you to help us.

Tomorrow, we will look at the staircase of complexity through a less scientific lens and don’t forget to sign up for our webinar on Wednesday, January 16 at 4:30 EST!
References
Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards for ELA and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects: Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards

Williamson, G. L. (2006). Aligning the journey with a destination: A model for K–16 reading standards. Durham, NC: MetaMetrics, Inc. (Shift 3: Text Complexity)

CA. Williamson, G.L. (2006b). What is expected growth? A white paper from the Lexile® Framework for Reading. Durham, NC: Metametrics, Inc.

Filed Under: Close Reads, complex text, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Planning for Instruction, Policy and Research, Research, Reviews, Text Complexity, text selection Tagged With: Appendix A, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, David Coleman, lexiles, MetaMetrics, Research, staircase of complexity, Text Complexity

Text-based Responses? The Jury is Still Out.

December 20, 2012 By Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 1 Comment

Note…A special thank you to the third-grade teachers who helped us with our little experiment!

This week we have looked closely at the EBSR, PARCC’s two-question prompts, for third grade ELA. The exploration has been interesting to say the least!

Two days ago, after Kim’s fourth-grade Nathaniel (Nathan) and Jan’s fourth-grade Nathaniel (Natie) read the passage How Animals Live, we watched as they answered the prototype questions. We were struck by how much their success (Nathan) and failure (Natie) seemed to depend little on the actual text. This made us wonder; does one have to read the text to answer the questions?

So we pulled in our other sons, and Jan recruited her husband. All three answered both questions correctly (separately) without reading the text. It seems that, by not reading the text one might actually be better able to filter out the detractors among the possible answers. This only works if the test taker understands the relationship between main ideas and supporting details and understands some things about how this testing format works. With these givens, however, looking at which pair of answers across the items works together seems to actually be an easier way to arrive at the correct answer than actually reading the text.

These findings, though unscientific, are interesting especially given David Coleman’s statement that 80% of questions teachers ask can be answered without reading text closely, an observation which appears to have led to Common Core Shift #4.

In support of Shift #4, PARCC’s explanation of how its assessments are aligned to the Common Core states:

“In regards to the ELA/Literacy assessments, this means PARCC will include:

Texts worth reading: The assessments will use authentic texts worthy of study instead of artificially produced or commissioned passages.
Questions worth answering: Sequences of questions that draw students into deeper encounters with texts will be the norm (as in an excellent classroom), rather than sets of random questions of varying quality.”

Of course, the two teenagers and one grown man in our “study” all read far above third-grade level. So, given our tiny sample size and the difference in the age of the test takers and the intended audience, what might our pseudo-results mean? Can third graders answer these questions without reading the text? We don’t know.

So we set out to gather more data. We contacted several third-grade teachers. Some of the teachers we asked to give the students the question prototype with the passage. The remaining teachers administered the prototype without letting students read the passage. The results are interesting, even though we need more information to draw any kind of conclusions.

Results for 3rd Graders Who DID NOT Read the Passage

Yesterday, 43 third-graders answered the ELA EBSR prototype for their grade-level. Of those, none of the students gave the correct answer for part A and only one gave the correct answer for part B, which means none of the students would receive any points for their answers. Once we get more details about the actual answer combinations of the students, we will have more insight into this result.

We are interested in whether students understood that there should be a connection between the two questions. Their three years of experience with standardized tests have taught them that multiple choice questions function independent of each other. We asked the teacher to administer the “test” without any explanation. We are concerned that the results might indicate an issue with the test format rather than validly indicating that students have difficulty identifying main ideas and citing evidence to support their opinions. Once we get a chance to look at the individual answer combinations, we hope to have some insight into whether or not students seemed to be connecting the two answers or answering them as if they were unrelated.

Results for 3rd Graders Who DID Read the Passage

As it turns out, however, to some extent we (you and us) have been testing this text-based question throughout this blog series, even when Nathan and Natie read the passage. Thank you to the two Burkins & Yaris readers who pointed out that there is actually a page missing from the passage! So even students who read the passage before answering the question, really didn’t get a chance to read the complete text closely.

It seems that our earlier criticisms of the text may prove irrelevant. We hope so! We are optimistic that inserting the missing page will make the text much more cohesive, although it is hard to imagine what text could fill that missing page and tie together the pages we have!

So, as an indicator of whether or not reading the passage before taking the “test,” our field test is completely invalid because the passage was incomplete. It seems noteworthy, however, that of the 72 third-graders who read the incomplete version of How Animals Live, 21% got both Part A and Part B correct, despite the absence of the middle ⅓ of the text.

So, here are our accumulating concerns:

1. (from Tuesday’s post) The test makers don’t seem to understand text complexity. Please note: The confusing text was due in part to the missing page that we did not notice until two of our readers pointed it out! Even with that page, we can’t imagine that the text fits our understandings of complexity.

2. (from Wednesday’s post) We are skeptical about the validity of the test.

3. (from today’s post) The paired items may actually make the questions less text-based. Because the two questions depend on each other, then the process of elimination may be easier. We suspect that students may be able to get more of these questions right without reading the passage than if it was a single test item.

Filed Under: Alignment, Assessment, Common Core State Standards, Educational Reform, Implementation, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Leadership, Planning for Instruction, Standardized Testing, Text Based Questions, Text Complexity, Uncategorized Tagged With: Achieve Inc, CCSS, Common Core State Standards, EBSR, Michael Cohen, PARCC, Pearson, standardized testing, Text Complexity, text-based responses

April Favorites 2013

Hope and the Common Core

When is More Less?

What Martin Luther King Jr. Says About the Common Core

Working Smarter, not Harder: 3 Ways to Collaborate Around the Common Core (Part 2)

Working Smarter, not Harder: 3 Ways to Collaborate Around the Common Core (Part 1)

Climbing the Staircase of Complexity: The Research and the Reality (Part 2)

Climbing the Staircase of Complexity: The Research and the Reality (Part 1)

Top 12 Posts of 2012!

Text-based Responses? The Jury is Still Out.

Visit Us!

Sign Up for our Blog!

Follow Us!