Reading and Writing Performance Assessments
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Common-Core-Aligned Performance Assessments
These performance assessments were created by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project for NYC Department of Education and some are owned by NYC Department of Education. The NYC Department of Education has agreed to allow Teachers College Reading and Writing Project to post the performance assessments online to support your students' academic progress. You must obtain permission from the NYC Department of Education for any other use of the assessments.
Performance Assessments engage students in authentic, high-level work that is aligned to curricular standards so that teachers can more carefully plan for instruction that meets students where they are and moves them forward. The performance assessments you will find here were designed to align to particular Common Core State Standards in reading and writing, and to anchor specific units of study in data collection and close observation of student work. We recommend viewing these as both pre- and post-assessments: you may (and we suggest doing so) conduct the assessment in whole or in part before teaching the relevant units, as a measure of what students are capable of prior to your instruction; you will then use the data from this assessment to tailor your units to students’ specific strengths and needs, and then conduct the same assessment again at the end of the unit, to determine students' growth and to reflect on your instruction.
The overarching goal of assessing students is to provide a clear sense of what students have internalized and what still needs support in regards to the standards-based skills at hand. You will find teacher instructions as well as student-facing instructions and supports; you will also find rubrics that clearly connect the task to the CCSS, and annotated and graded examples of student work. The texts for these tasks are included where we have obtained permissions; in some cases you will need to purchase the relevant texts.
In the case of the second grade assessment, children will study nonfiction reading and informational book writing as two separate but related units. The assessment you’ll find here is designed to help you determine students’ proficiency levels in reading nonfiction and summarizing the information therein and in writing an informational text based in part on information they have read themselves, heard read aloud, or viewed in video form.
In the fifth and eighth grade assessments, students will study nonfiction research methods in reading workshop and research-based argument essay writing in writing workshop. The assessments here are designed to gauge students' abilities to: 1. read nonfiction texts, determining their main ideas and supporting details, 2. plan, draft and revise an essay in which they take a stance on a complex issue and support that stance with information derived from readings of printed text and/or viewings of relevant video clips.
