In this article, we describe student-centered routines that prepare students for success on ambitious text-based writing assignments. Based on research showing the important role that peer collaboration and classroom discussion play in developing students' thinking, these routines support students to 'try out' their ideas, learn from the…

Writing analytically about text is a valued skill reflected in current academic standards. The quality of text-based writing opportunities in U.S. elementary schools, however, is generally weak, with variation in the rigor of the writing tasks teachers assign. Previous research suggests that teachers' beliefs about instruction significantly…

Supporting upper elementary students' higher level (i.e., analytic) thinking about texts in writing is a challenge for many teachers, in large part because what it means to analyze text is not well defined and because this skill is a relatively new expectation in elementary grades. In this article, the authors clarify the goal of three common…

Research shows that cognitively demanding text-based writing assignments increase students' reading comprehension skills and analytic writing competencies. In this article, we describe the steps that upper-elementary grade teachers can take to develop cognitively demanding assignments that build these higher-level literacy skills and put students…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

Guided by evidence that teachers contribute to student achievement outcomes, researchers have been reexamining how to study instruction and the classroom opportunities teachers create for students. We describe our experience measuring students' opportunities to develop analytic, text-based writing skills. Utilizing multiple methods of data…

This study explores two approaches to directly measuring the quality of instruction: teachers' assignments with student work and focused lesson observations. The technical quality and potential feasibility of these approaches for measuring instruction in large numbers of classrooms are compared within two different content areas (reading…

This report describes 4 years of research by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) on developing indicators of classroom practice that have the potential to be used in large-scale settings and that draw attention to important aspects of standards-based learning and instruction. CRESSTs method was…

This report describes the technical quality of a measure of the quality of classroom assignments piloted in the Los Angeles Unified School District's proposed new accountability system. The measure was developed by the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). For the study, 181 teachers were sampled from 35…

This article reports the technical quality of a measure describing the quality of classroom assignments piloted in the Los Angeles Unified School District's proposed new accountability system. For this study, 181 teachers were sampled from 35 schools selected at random. Participating teachers submitted three language arts assignments with samples…

The quality of reading comprehension and mathematics instruction was explored in five urban middle schools using the Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA) toolkit (N = 34 teachers). The IQA is comprised of protocols for rating observed instruction and the quality of teachers' assignments with student work. The purpose of this research was to…

Research indicates that the quality of classroom assignments makes a difference in student learning. Moreover, assignment quality varies between teachers even within the same school and there is room for improvement in many of the assignments that teachers provide to students. Assignment quality, as described in this book, puts into practice…

Investigated relation of the quality of third graders' writing assignments and written instructor feedback to quality of subsequent student work. Found that amount and type of teacher feedback predicted a small, significant proportion of variance in the quality of content, organization, and mechanics of final drafts. Initial writing quality…

This study presents preliminary findings from research developing an instructional quality assessment (IQA) toolkit that could be used to monitor the influence of reform initiatives on students' learning environments and to guide professional development efforts within a school or district. This report focuses specifically on the portion of the…