Sample Student Performance Assessments

All student performance assessments have been vetted by a team of Core Academy English Language Arts facilitators and the USBE English Language Arts Specialist. They:

1. align to the Utah core standards by grade band;
2. use student learning tasks that support students in developing the skills for argument writing and close reading;
3. use the cognitive rigor matrix and Depth of Knowledge levels (DOK) on which both interim and summative testing will be designed, beginning in 2014;
4. exemplify the change in instruction that is necessary to better prepare students for the end of level testing;
5. use a range of text complexity based on both lexile and qualitative criteria for each grade band;
6. provide resources for teachers to better adjust their teaching to a wide range of students; and,
7. support teachers in developing their own student performance assessments.
8. were developed based on the AIR Sensitivity and Bias Guidelines used for Utah’s assessment system.

Copyright(s) for this material will be held by the Utah State Board of Education, retaining all rights of ownership of the online textbook and any product(s) or derivative(s) of the textbook. Employees, consultants or independent contractors who provide services for curriculum projects should assume that they are developing or writing works for hire and that they have no personal ownership or copyright in the final product or materials. This work will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA). This license lets others remix, reuse, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as they credit USBE and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Grade 7 Sample
A Four Passage Text Set - Neruda, Alcott, Whitman, Goodrich and Hackett

Grade Band 9-10 Sample
A Three Passage Text Set - Lincoln, Monk, and Hand

Grade Band 11-12 Sample
A Three Passage Text Set - Roosevelt, Sinclair, and Riis

Grade Band 11-12 Sample
A Three Passage Text Set - Thoreau, Wilder and Dickinson