After discussing the various standards that my mentor teacher is working on with her 6th grade
language arts class, I went to the drawing board to develop a skills assessment that would give me
greater insight into the level that her students are currently performing at, both individually and across
the larger class population. The assessment focused on analyzing and interpreting literary texts and the
standards were taken from the Middle Grade English Language Arts OAE framework. The specific
standards that I assessed students for were—
RL.6.2 Analyze literary text development.
a. Determine a theme of a text and how it is conveyed through particular
details.
RL.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as
inferences drawn from the text.
RL.6.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text,
including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word
choices, including sensory language, on meaning and tone.
RL.6.6 Explain how an author uses the point of view to develop the perspective of the
narrator or speaker in a text.
These standards were displayed neatly on a bulletin board in my mentor teacher’s room, so it was easy
to take a note of the specific skills they were working on; the next step for me was to find a short text
which I could effectively assess these skills through, and this led me to a short story entitled Stray by
Cynthia Rylant which comes from her larger collection of stories entitled Every Living Thing. Not only
was this text short and easy to draw standards-based questions from, but the students seemed to enjoy
th
RisL s.6to.1ry L oaso kwinegll ,a atn tdh ias tfeewxt ,o tfa tkhee am m moamdeen stu troe uton dteelrll imnee aanb oeuxa
a) the plot developments in this story (i.e. what happens) and b) what inferences readers might draw
Going off of the text selection, I generated 4 questions that correlated to the given standards
about the character’s emotions? Make sure to cite this textual example AND provide a brief sentence
(sefoer d yoocuurm aennatly 1s ibse.low), and provided students with 20-25 minutes to read the story and then answer
thReL q.6u.e4s tiOonn tsh bee bfoottreo wme o mf poavgeed 4o3n toof tthheis nteexxtt, a tchtiev aituyt.h Tohr ete vlalsr
feed it table scraps” and that she “was sensitive about throwing away food.” Briefly describe your
cleuanrd peircsttuarned oinf gt hoef rtahneg we oorfd s “kgilrlsu dthgaint ghlye”r sintu tdheisn ptsa shsaavgee a? cAqNuD
Lacey’s ‘sensitivity’ for throwing away food?
challenge for some, they seemed to be right around their range of proximal development in terms of
skills acquisition, and this was encouraging to see. One of the most noteworthy data points that I could
identify across the larger population was effort—some students were very engaged and gave thoughtful
responses and others did not. The two questions that were shown to be more challenging for the
students were connected to RL 6.1 and RL 6.4 which was provided me with good take-away data in
order to help build future lessons that would build on these standards. These questions were—
Document 2 (below) shows a varied collection of student responses. For the two-part question that
prompted students to cite textual evidence (RL.6.1), I found that many of them answered part A in their
own words and did not provide any direct quotation from the text (example A); and in others, they
either failed to provide an analysis or their analysis was not reflective of the larger plot of the story but
rather of a singular reference to character emotion in the story (example B). Noticing this, I decided that
that this standard (citation/analysis) is a skill that needs attention, and I also realized that I could have
done a better job of framing the question in clear and understandable terms. For the question on ‘word
and phrase meaning’ (RL.6.4), I received a mix of correct and incorrect responses along with some that
were incomplete or ‘slightly off the mark’, and this was very valuable data as well. I know that these
students are right at the point of developing a vocabulary that is geared to higher level reading, and that
this comprehension skill of making inferences about word meaning based on context clues is one that
will be great catalyst for overall vocabulary acquisition. Kate Roberts generalizes this idea when
discussing students “move[ment] from the more literal work of understanding words (being able to
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