English Language Arts Case Study

In this case study of a fifth-grade, high-achieving, high-needs ELA classroom, the authors present a complete cycle of instruction and assessment with samples of student work, teacher feedback, and a peek into decision-making and inferences teachers can base on assessment information. Mrs. L wants to target her students’ reading comprehension and analysis. She identifies the relevant standards, defines SLOs and objectives for student self-monitoring and self-reflection, and implements a pre-assessment to examine students’ awareness of reading strategies. She presents students with strategies for doing character analysis with a text, asks them to try the strategies, and holds reading conferences with individual students to check their progress. Three student samples are presented at various levels of proficiency. Mrs. L embeds frequent assessment in her instructional routines, asks students to reflect on their own work, and gives “glows” and “grows” as feedback. After students are given a culminating assessment to check their ability to use textual evidence support of claims, Mrs. L communicates the results to students and their parents. At various checkpoints, the authors suggest ways Mrs. L’s assessment activities align with their four-stage CA:SRL framework.