Let’s take a look. > When reading literary texts such as fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, fourth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level can

Let’s take a look. > When reading literary texts such as fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, fourth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level can likely: > determine the relevant meaning of familiar words using context within the same sentence or paragraph They can pick out context clues. > identify a specific detail to make a simple inference about the characters’ actions, motivations, or feelings, using a single point or multiple points in the text if they are in close proximity They can determine that “Sally is sad” from the sentence “Sally was crying on the bus.” > sequence or categorize events from the story They can follow the flow of actions in a story. > make a general reference to an appropriate section of the text or provide some support for ideas related to the plot or characters They can answer basic questions about the text and what happened within it. Perhaps the language used within the listed standards gives off an air of “difficulty”, but the fact is that none of these 4th grade students would be expected to understand that vocabulary. These are condensed and taught at an appropriate reading level for the students. The sad reality is that students’ reading levels are down across the board. My wife has students reading at a "3rd grade level" in the 11th grade, while we have a son who read at a "3rd grade level" in 1st. That’s a huge problem. This problem is systemic and should be taken seriously. Edit: I wanted to note that these standards were confusing to me at first. My wife has a masters in curriculum instruction and had to break down how standards-based grading works. It's not explicitly teaching kids higher vocabulary—the verbiage is there to be extremely specific for teachers and curriculum boards to understand what to focus on when developing grade-level curriculum and adjusting their pace for each class (as every class will perform at their own pace) > Based on these standards it still looks bad, but to an untrained eye they seem wildly high for 10 year olds. Scores haven’t meaningfully changed I think since they started testing with this rubric so really doesn’t mean much IMO.