Closely associated with the Common Core State Standards are two test-development consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness (often referred to as PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). PARCC and SBAC are in the midst of field testing assessments designed to track and inform students of their…[Read more]

Those following this Commons group may find useful as an introduction to the Common Core Standards the first chapter of Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement, by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman. The chapter is available to download free from the Web site of the Reading and Writing Project that…[Read more]

Participants in this discussion of text complexity may be interested in a research report, Using Multiple Sources of Information in Establishing Text Complexity, by Elfrieda H. Hiebert of TextProject, Inc. University of California, Santa Cruz.

The TextProject also has a Web page devoted to the topic of text complexity in the context of the Common…[Read more]