New Student Work Samples Published for Instructional Materials Examples

Student Work Can Be an Indicator of Alignment and Quality

Washington, D.C. – Achieve today published annotated student work samples to complement its EQuIP work. EQuIP (Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products) is an initiative designed to identify high-quality materials aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). 

To enhance this work and increase its usefulness to educators, Achieve launched the EQuIP Student Work Initiative. Student work samples provide additional indicators of the alignment and quality of instructional materials. As such, this initiative is designed to add annotated student work samples to the existing collection of example units for each content area and grade band.  

Achieve brought together teams of educators who implemented one or more tasks from previously identified example units and collected samples of student work representing a range of proficiency levels. Each team focused on a different grade band and content area. Following a collaborative five-step process for annotating student work based on Achieve’s Student Work Protocol, the teams analyzed and annotated each sample within their grade band and content area. The teams reached consensus about the annotations as well as their placement within each sample. 

"The annotation meeting was a great experience to get together with colleagues to closely look at how our work aligns with the standards,” concluded one teacher team of Holly VanEpps, Ritajo Brindle, Elaine Farrand, and Lisa Montanaro from Brockport, NY. “It served as a way to examine the purpose of the assignment and to analyze what skills we were actually assessing and what constitutes high-quality work. As educators, we love to be able to see and show our students examples and models, so it is our hope that this work will be beneficial not only to us, but to others as well."

The entire collection of annotated samples, along with a description of the process and guide used to create the annotations can be found at https://www.achieve.org/equip/annotated-student-work. 

EQuIP is comprised of a set of criterion-based rubrics designed for educators to use in evaluating the quality and alignment of lessons and units. To increase the supply of aligned lessons and units, Achieve launched the EQuIP Peer Review Panel in June of 2013. The panel, comprised of 84 educators from across the country with over 1200 years of collective classroom experience, was trained to apply the EQuIP Rubrics and quality review process to lessons and units that were submitted by states, districts, partners, and educators. At the conclusion of the panel, 165 lessons and units were identified as examples and published to Achieve’s website.  To learn more about EQuIP or download example lessons and units, please visit https://www.achieve.org/EQuIP.

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MEDIA CONTACT: Chad Colby (202) 419-1570, ccolby@achieve.org

Kelly Van Beveren (202) 745-2306, kvanbeveren@achieve.org