From Learning Progressions to Integrated Performances: Supporting the Common Core State Standards by Focusing on Key Practices

• In Event: Building and Validating Cognitively Based, Technology-Enhanced English Language Arts Assessments

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize a number of literate practices that are critical to college and career readiness, including building and justifying interpretations from textual evidence, pursuing effective research practices, and building well-justified arguments. While the elements of these practices are placed variously under reading, writing, or even language skills in the standards, we can identify implied constructs that represent the coordinated cognitive capacities that underlie high levels of literacy. As part of continued development of the CBAL competency model and learning progressions, we have identified ten core practices that cover the skills identified in the ELA reading, writing, and speaking/listening practices, but also can be mapped onto learning progressions we have been developing as part of our analysis of the cognitive basis for skills in the English Language Arts. These ten practices can be enumerated as follows:

• Communicating by Speaking & Listening
• Reading Silently & Aloud
(emergent reading)
• Writing Down Words & Ideas
(emergent writing)
• Constructing Shared Social Understandings
(ability to handle narrative and related social communication abilities)
• Building & Sharing Knowledge
(ability to extract knowledge from expository texts and convey it to others)
• Planning, Developing and Collaborating on Projects
• Building and Justifying Interpretations
• Discussing & Debating Ideas
• Conducting Inquiry & Research
• Writing, Reviewing & Publishing Documents

We will present a revision of the CBAL ELA framework organized in terms of these ten practices. This revision is motivated by the following priorities:

1. Justifying the scenarios used in CBAL scenario-based assessments. Implicit in earlier versions of the CBAL model has been the idea that the scenarios around which a CBAL assessment is built are representative of key practices that ought to be the focus of instruction and therefore ought to be the focus of assessment. By analyzing the sequence of reading, writing and thinking tasks that need to be coordinated for successful performance in each practice, we are able to justify key elements for the scenarios used in CBAL assessments. For instance, argumentation practices arguably involve several phases (understanding the stakes, exploring the subject, developing a position, building and evaluating arguments, and presenting and reacting to explicitly stated arguments). When assessments are designed to simulate natural stages in key practices, we can make a strong construct case that they are representative and appropriate constructs for the targeted assessments.
2. Supporting more effective links between assessment and instruction. The skills that underlie the English Language Arts can be viewed through many different lenses, and therefore can be categorized in very different ways. If we organize and present the ELA learning progressions in terms of the key practices, the relevance of each specific learning progression can be made immediately apparent and their educational value will be easier to elucidate.
This poster will present an overview of the CBAL ELA competency model and learning progressions, organized in terms of the ten practices, and will provide the necessary background for the more detailed studies presented in the other posters.

Authors

• Paul Deane, Educational Testing Service

• John P. Sabatini, ETS

• Gary Feng, Educational Testing Service

• Tenaha P. O'Reilly, ETS

• Jesse R. Sparks, Educational Testing Service

• Yi Song, Educational Testing Service