All students should graduate from high school ready for college, careers, and citizenship.
Annotated Student Work
Annotated Student Work Initiative
EQuIP (Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products) is an initiative of Achieve designed to identify high-quality materials aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
In an effort to identify emerging examples of instructional materials, Achieve launched the EQuIP Peer Review Panel to review CCSS-aligned lessons and units in ELA/literacy and mathematics using the EQuIP rubrics and quality review process. Through this project over one hundred example lessons and units have been identified and are available at https://www.achieve.org/equip.
To complement the EQuIP quality review process, Achieve launched the EQuIP Annotated 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 lessons and units for each content area and grade band.
Student Work Annotation Key
CCSS Alignment
Proficiency with the targeted CCSS. Identify the standard in the annotation
Understanding
Understanding and reasoning ability
Support MAterials
Supporting materials (including scoring guidelines/rubrics)
Comprehension & Application
ELA: Student comprehension of grade-level text (R.10)
Math: Appling a particular Mathematical Practice?
Language Challenges
Challenges with respect to language demands
Objectives
The objectives of the EQuIP Annotated Student Work Initiative are:
• To analyze student work from a set of tasks within a unit to establish evidence of student proficiency.
• To annotate student work to identify key aspects of how the student’s performance indicates student proficiency and understanding with respect to the targeted CCSS.
Process
Teams of educators implemented one or more tasks from example lessons or units in each grade span (elementary, middle, and high school) and submitted samples of student work. To increase the likelihood of a variety of student responses in each submission, samples were collected from a range of student proficiency levels. Profile descriptors were developed for proficiency levels and, based on the teacher’s knowledge of the student’s prior academic performance, student work was assigned to one of the following profiles:
Level 1 – Students who have not yet demonstrated grade-level proficiency.
Level 2 – Students whose home language is not English and have not yet demonstrated grade-level proficiency.
Level 3 – Students who have generally demonstrated grade-level proficiency.
Level 4 – Students who have generally demonstrated advanced proficiency for the grade level.
The evaluation team then analyzed the students’ responses to the selected tasks using the five steps of the annotation process:
Step 1: Study the Task(s)
Step 2: Analyze the Targeted CCSS
Step 3: Analyze Individual Student Work Samples
Step 4: Reach Consensus on Annotations
Step 5: Apply Consensus Annotations to Individual Student Work Samples
Collaboration
As is the case with other EQuIP quality review work, collaboration is essential to this process, with team discussion and consensus being key to a successful review of student work associated with CCSS-aligned lessons or units. With this in mind, Achieve brought together the grade level teams of educators to apply the five-step process and to annotate their students’ work. The teams reached consensus about the annotations using the following guiding questions:
• What does the student’s work demonstrate about his/her proficiency with the requirements of the targeted CCSS?
• What does the student’s work demonstrate about the depth of his/her understanding and reasoning ability?
• How does the application of the scoring guidelines/rubrics related to the task support an under standing of the student’s proficiency?
• ELA: What does the work demonstrate about student comprehension of grade-level text (R.10)?
Math: What does the work demonstrate about the student’s ability to apply a particular Mathematical Practice?
• Where are there challenges with respect to language demands in the student work?
States and districts are encouraged to collect and annotate student work samples for their own aligned lessons and units. The EQuIP Student Work Annotation Guide is available to support educators who are interested in following the steps in the annotation process. The Student Work Annotation process is the perfect culmination to the EQuIP quality review process and the EQuIP Student Work Protocol. Using all three phases for a particular lesson or unit ensures that the lesson or unit addresses the dimensions and criteria of high-quality CCSS-aligned curriculum; that it is further improved based on whether student responses to the lesson or unit reflect the same performance goals as the targeted CCSS; and that student performance can be used to assess proficiency for the standards targeted by the lesson or unit.