The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with Questar Assessment Inc. (Questar) for the development of the 2020 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2020…

Language awareness has been largely overlooked by the American education system. This paper provides background knowledge needed to justify language awareness in classroom teaching. As educators we need to be more informed and think more systematically about teaching linguistic diversity in our classrooms.

Unlock the power of personalized reading with practical strategies and easy-to-use ideas to engage students in the digital age. In the first edition of this book, the authors identified ways for working with four different types of readers--struggling readers, reluctant readers, English learners, and advanced readers--using technology to…

Decades of federal and state education legislation enacted to increase student academic achievement and enhance school quality have pronounced impacts on teachers and their instructional practice. That impact is captured in the term intensification. Intensification is multifaceted and manifests as additional tasks accomplished simultaneously, with…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

The assessment landscape is varied and complex. Because assessments serve many purposes, they can take multiple forms depending on what they are measuring and how they are used. The intended purpose behind each assessment influences its design, and the design influences how assessment data can be used by students and their families, school,…

The instructions in this manual explain the responsibilities of school administrators for the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP) Grades 3-8 English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Grades 5 & 8 Science Tests. School administrators must be thoroughly familiar with the contents of the manual, and the policies and procedures must be followed…

This study aimed to understand how a multi-tiered social-emotional curriculum could be implemented at the middle school level and its impact on student mental health, academic progress, and school culture at a public school in the Northeast. Many secondary schools quickly remediate academic skills rather than examining a student's social-emotional…

Discipline-specific literacy instruction is key to supporting adolescents' overall literacy development. Job-embedded professional development that supports teachers' discipline-specific literacy instruction via instructional coaching is a promising approach to enacting disciplinary literacy instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms.…

Are you looking for ways to enhance and strengthen how you teach your students to write effective opinion pieces as outlined in the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards? In this teaching tip, the authors describe an innovative and dialogic approach that elementary school teachers can use and adapt as needed to strengthen students'…

This study examines how emergent bilinguals seek help in language arts and how peers respond to their requests for help. Using 6 months of naturally occurring student talk in a U.S. fourth grade classroom, this article shows that (a) emergent bilinguals more frequently use general requests than specific requests to obtain help, (b) only 41% of…

In this dissertation I investigate 1. What it is like to teach English language arts while grieving a death and 2. How the relational work of teaching influences teachers' engagement with English language arts curriculum while they are grieving a death. In order to understand experiences of grieving a death while teaching English language arts, I…

Underachievement for all student populations remains a pressing concern for educational systems, and gifted student populations are no exception. However, many aim for academic-focused interventions while leaving out the social-emotional driving factors in underachievement. Researchers have found connections between social-emotional interventions…

This article explores the practice-linked identity resources offered to preservice ELA teachers as they moved through a teacher preparation program. Nasir and Cooks's (2009) concepts of ideational, material, and relational resources are used as a frame to analyze the way preservice teachers talked about teaching writing at three points during…

In 2007, Jake, the author's 14-year-old son, died. Though he had a known heart condition, Jake was vibrant and lived a life with no restrictions. The heart attack that killed him was unexpected. As a teacher, the author was left with the question of how to return to the classroom and what she would share with the students. This article explores…