Topic Progress:

UNPACKING CONSTRUCTED RESPONSE ITEMS

Constructed Response Items

  • Include short-answer, open response, extended response, and essays
  • Are more likely to reveal whether or not students understand and can apply what they are learning
  • Utilize performance criteria (rubrics) to evaluate degree of student proficiency

Benefits of Constructed Response

  • Contribute to making valid inferences about student understanding.
  • Measure higher cognitive processing.
  • Allow for diversity in student responses or solution processes.
  • Provide a better picture of students’ reasoning.
  • Promote the use of evidence to support claims and ideas.

Considerations of Constructed Response

  • Take longer to score.
  • Depend on student writing proficiency.
  • Must be scored consistently and objectively.
  • Must have clear rubrics/scoring guide for scoring criteria

Key Points for Writing Constructed Response Items

  • Questions should be open-ended.
  • Items must match the level of rigor of the standard being assessed.
  • Answers reflect a command of higher-order skills and concepts.

Bill is going to order new jerseys for his baseball team with the team logo printed on the front. Bill asks 2 local companies to give him a price.

  1. ‘Print It’ will charge $21.50 each for the jerseys. Using n for the number of jerseys ordered and c for the total cost in dollars, write an equation to show the total cost of jerseys from ‘Print It’.
  2. ‘Top Print’ has an initial set-up cost of $70 and then charges $18 for each jersey. Using n to stand for the number of jerseys ordered and c for the total cost in dollars, write an equation to show the total cost of jerseys from ‘Top Print’.
  3. Use the two equations from questions 1 and 2 to figure out how many jerseys Bill would need to order for the price from ‘Top Print’ to be less than from ‘Print It’.

Source: Letter from Joseph F. Green, a soldier in the Union Army, to his friend Julia Reynolds on January 2, 1863.

Source text: “Well we are trying to get a long the best we can and I tell you that is poor a nough. The troops all Seem to be discouraged Since the last battle at Fredericksburgh. I tell you that they hadent better ever take this army back to Alexandria or they will all [desert] and go home. I dont see what our government is doing.”

Question 1: Explain why a historian might not think that Joseph F. Green’s letter reflects the morale of the entire Union Army.

Question 2:  Read the 3 documents below.  Explain whether each document could be used to support Joseph F. Green’s claims about the morale of the Union army.

The 3 documents that students need to read for Question 2 are not included in this presentation but what kind of thinking is question 2 asking them to do? What standard(s) are being assessed by Question 2? (Thinking skills and standards: comparing, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, finding text evidence, supporting arguments with text evidence, reading non-fiction text, reading original source material)

Vertical Line Test

  1. A graph must pass the vertical line test to be a function. Use this information to figure out how to determine if a set of points is a function or not. Explain your answer.
  2. A graph must pass the vertical line test to be a function. Use this information to figure out how to determine if a table (an x column and a y column) of points is a function or not. Explain your answer.