Using NAEP Items to Help Students Achieve the Benchmarks

by Carol Brown Dodson

Have you ever been surprised when a good student performs poorly on the reading test? Or did you begin to doubt the accuracy of the assessment? Often the student seems to understand the benchmarks and indicators and performs well on typical classroom assessments―unit tests, literature quizzes, dialogue journals, etc. The student probably participates in class discussions and seems to get all the nuances of meaning in the literature being studied. Why then, you might ask, did this student fail the test?

There's no easy answer for all the times this scenario occurs, but one possible solution involves making some changes in lesson emphasis and assessments. Instead of following the textbook lessons or relying on lessons that have been successful in the past, consider combining peer-reviewed ORC lessons with released test items from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

One benchmark that is particularly troublesome for students is found in the Reading Applications: Informational, Persuasive, and Technical Text standard. It is Benchmark B: "Identify examples of rhetorical devices and valid and invalid inferences, and explain how authors use these devices to achieve their purposes and reach their intended audiences" (Ohio Academic Content Standards for English Language Arts). The benchmark involves more than the identification of rhetorical devices and inferences; the benchmark also includes the expectation that students can explain how such devices help authors achieve their purpose and reach an audience.

A companion benchmark that is also difficult for students to meet is Benchmark D, also for the informational text standard. For this benchmark, students need to "explain and analyze how an author appeals to an audience and develops an argument or viewpoint in text." In addition, Benchmark D conveys the expectation that students will distance themselves enough from the meaning of the text to focus on the author's writing of the passage―attitude, viewpoint, organizational pattern (Ohio Academic Content Standards for English Language Arts).

Many tenth-grade students have trouble understanding the intent of these benchmarks, often asking such questions as, "Didn't the author write the article to make money?" or "The audience is anyone who reads the article. How could the author know who would read it?" or "How can the writer's viewpoint change because of the people who read the piece?" This naivet� on the part of students is perfectly understandable―they simply haven't thought much about the real purpose behind the writing of a column, an article, or other informational text. Not considering author's purpose is especially evident when the author is a professional who writes for publication.

One way to help students understand the real meaning of the benchmark is to move away from the fairly standard lesson plan which requires them to read an article or chapter, followed by discussion and response to questions. Consider instead using a lesson such as the controversial-issues lesson described below. As they work through the multiple lessons, students will discover for themselves how an author's attitude toward a subject and purpose for writing affects the writing.

Censorship in the Classroom: Understanding Controversial Issues
This lesson helps students to understand the ways in which bias and stereotyping are used by the media to influence popular opinion. Students examine propaganda and media bias and explore a variety of banned and challenged books, researching the reasons these books have been censored. Following this research, students choose a side of the censorship issue and support their position through the development of an advertising campaign. Because this lesson uses resources and texts that may be viewed as controversial, it is recommended that parental notification occur prior to teaching. (author/ncl)

As students examine some of the lists of banned book titles, they'll see titles of books they've read in school as assigned reading or by choice―such as books in the Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz or the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. They may even recognize titles of books they've been told by their parents not to read. But more importantly, students will begin to understand why authors produce some pieces of writing and how a writer reveals an attitude or viewpoint toward the subject as well as how the author appeals to an audience to agree with this viewpoint. Through an examination of effective media campaigns for or against a banned book, students discover powerful examples of propaganda techniques. They will learn to identify and explain rhetorical devices and inferences which are used for both criticism and defense of the banned books.

Some assessment items from the National Assessment of Educational Progress focus on this same expectation―to see and analyze an author's purpose or viewpoint toward a subject. These items may be used to assess students' prior knowledge of the benchmark before the lesson is taught or to determine their performance in regard to the benchmark after they complete the lesson.

NAEP Assessment Item, Grade 8 Ellis Island: "Land of free.." not so ― why
Students draw conclusions about the author's viewpoint. This is a sample constructed response test item used in a past National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessment (for more information, see About NAEP). From this test item, a visitor may view the reading passage and choose to access information regarding general performance on this item, a scoring guide and student responses (in the case of constructed response items), and performance on this item by various subgroups. The NAEP web site also allows visitors to build a printable database of questions by clicking on "Add Question" in the upper right hand corner of the screen. NAEP Reference Number: 2005-8R7, No.8. (Author/crr)

After reading a passage about the flood of immigrants coming into America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students respond to the following constructed-response question:

Why does the author say "'the land of the free' was not so free to everyone, after all"?

This question produced the results seen below in the chart. (Note: These results are for public and nonpublic school students.) A full 37 percent of students wrote an unacceptable answer.

To write an acceptable answer, the test taker merely needed to produce any one of the "acceptable" responses listed in the scoring guide below. An unacceptable answer indicates that the student simply did not understand the passage.

Examples of unacceptable responses to the questions above include the following two answers.

Unacceptable student response:

Unacceptable student response:

Additional student responses may be accessed on the website by selecting "student responses." Once the student responses are visible, a link provided for each answer takes the user to "scorer's comments" for that response.

As teachers push students toward reaching the benchmarks, one of the most perplexing issues is knowing when students succeed in reaching a benchmark. NAEP assessment items are particularly useful in determining student achievement in a standards-based system. By using these readily available items to assess student knowledge, it's possible to determine whether or not intervention is needed to help adolescents reach the established goals. All NAEP reading and writing released items which match Ohio benchmarks are available on the ORC website. They can be accessed by browsing the standards and selecting ORC resources for a particular benchmark. An advanced search in which it's possible to limit the search to assessment resources is also useful for locating appropriate NAEP items.

The additional NAEP assessment items, provided below, are useful for assessing all five informational text benchmarks. The first two items are designated as grade 12, but the items are closely related to the expectations of the Ohio Graduation Test.

NAEP Assessment Item, Grade 12: Minow: How to improve children's TV programs
After reading the passage, students draw conclusions about the author's arguments. This is a sample constructed response test item used in a past National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessment (for more information, see About NAEP). From this test item, a visitor may view the reading passage and choose to access information regarding general performance on this item, a scoring guide and student responses (in the case of constructed response items), and performance on this item by various subgroups. The NAEP web site also allows visitors to build a printable database of questions by clicking on "Add Question" in the upper right hand corner of the screen. NAEP Reference Number: 2002-12R8, No. 5. (Author/ncl)

NAEP Assessment Item, Grade 12: Minow: Why TV responsible to public
Using examples from the text, students offer an analysis of the author's arguments. This is a sample constructed response test item used in a past National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessment (for more information, see About NAEP). From this test item, a visitor may view the reading passage and choose to access information regarding general performance on this item, a scoring guide and student responses (in the case of constructed response items), and performance on this item by various subgroups. The NAEP web site also allows visitors to build a printable database of questions by clicking on "Add Question" in the upper right hand corner of the screen. NAEP Reference Number: 2002-12R8, No.4. (Author/ncl)

NAEP Assessment Item, Grade 8: Gary Soto: Author: Attitude Soto/poems
Responding to an article about author Gary Soto, students write a critical response about the writer's attitude toward his subject. This is a sample constructed response test item used in a past National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessment (for more information, see About NAEP). From this test item, a visitor may view the reading passage and choose to access information regarding general performance on this item, a scoring guide and student responses (in the case of constructed response items), and performance on this item by various subgroups. The NAEP web site also allows visitors to build a printable database of questions by clicking on "Add Question" in the upper right hand corner of the screen. NAEP Reference Number: 1998-8R4, No. 7. (Author/ncl)

Carol Brown Dodson is the outreach specialist for the Ohio Resource Center. Dodson was an English language arts consultant for the Ohio Department of Education and is past president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts). Dodson, formerly a high school English teacher, department chair, and supervisor of English language arts in Columbus Public Schools, serves on the Ohio Graduation Test Reading Content Committee.

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