AGLI Text – Compose clear sentences to answer literal
questions (e.g. who, what, where, when, how, and/or why) or to present
information about explicit informational text.
Task – The student will answer who, what, where, when, how,
and why literal questions in clear and complete sentences to a given reading
passage.
The verifying evidence is three paragraphs about skunks
followed by 6 questions one each of why, where, how, what, when, and who.
The teacher includes an explanation for grading which is the
grading system she uses for this type of ELA activity.
Explanation for Grading
The student will lose ½ credit if the sentence needs
additional words to make it complete and clear, as well as missing punctuation
at the end of each sentence. All sentences must begin with a capital letter.
Modifying a word (such as past or present tense or plural) will not be given a
deduction unless it changes the answer from being correct.
The student lost ½ credit for not capitalizing a proper
name.
The student lost ½ credit for not writing a complete
sentence.
Even with the Explanation for Grading – the thinking was the
student should get full credit for the missing capital letter but the student
should lose full credit because the sentence was not complete – “When he is
being chased.”
RESPONSE: We've typically
said as long as the student response is a basic sentence (noun and verb) any
additional level of detail regarding the completeness or complexity of the
sentence is up to the teacher based on typical classroom instruction. It would
be good practice for the teacher to create a rubric to determine student
performance; for example a certain number of points for a logical response, a
certain number of points for a sentence that contains a noun and verb in logical
sequence, a certain number of points for correct capitalization, and a certain
number of points for correct punctuation. The teacher seems to have done this.
Whether the teacher took off points for capitalization is something that you can
work out with him or her, the administration guidelines do not require a certain
way to score performance with regard to this aspect of “clear sentences.”
