 Hi everyone, I'm Steph Wannick from ESU 8. Thanks for joining me today for today's Wednesday webinar NISA ELA Transition. You may have heard that NISA is going through some changes and some of you may have even attended or some of your colleagues attended that fall sessions from NDE on these changes. Hopefully by watching this webinar you are either refreshed of the changes or you are hearing them for the first time and have just surface level understanding of some things that are going to change with NISA ELA. So you might be used to that name NISA R, NISA reading, and it is changing to ELA which stands for English Language Arts and that's because it aligns to the Nebraska English Language Arts standards that were adopted in 2014. When we looked at those standards it's easy to realize that many of the reading comprehension skills cannot be assessed without students doing some writing and many of the writing skills can't be assessed without students doing some reading. So it was important to combine both of those skills on one test. And lots of those skills lead to that college and career readiness that we now know is so important for our students. They also use higher order thinking skills and it's a lot more like what we do in our classrooms every day. We don't just assess with multiple choice there. We have different kinds of answer types to or question types to get at students thinking a little bit better. So what will these new question types actually look like on the test? Well the first is multiple choice. This is just like what we have been using with NISA reading and students select a correct answer from four choices. Let's take a look at an example here. This is a third grade example. NDE on their assessment page has samplers for each grade level available and so this is just a screenshot from one of those and I'll have a link at the end so that you can go to the site and look at your own grade level or span of grade levels to better prepare yourself for these changes. But again this is a multiple choice question and it's the question based on the passage that they've read with four answer choices. The next question type is evidence-based selected response or EBSR and what students do here is they respond to an informational or literature passage. There are two parts to these questions. Part one is going to ask them to analyze the passage and choose an answer from a multiple choice list. Part two is going to ask them to find evidence in the passage that will prove their answer to part one and on this question type you must correctly answer part one to receive credit for part two. If part one is incorrect you cannot have credit for part two. That would just show guessing pretty much. So again part one must be correct to receive credit for part two. So let's take a look at an example from the sampler. This is a seventh grade example. We see in part a they're supposed to reread a sentence from the paragraph and choose what the sentence means. Okay so they have four answer choices. On part b this time it says select two details from the passage that support the answer in part a and it says select two again. So it is really emphasizing that number two to remind them to select two parts. And because there are two correct answers there are five choices. If there's only one correct answer then they pick from just four choices. So again we see that um part a asks a question. Part b um proves it or backs up with evidence from the text. Next we have auto scored constructed response or ASCR. These get a higher level thinking without having to have hand scored items that are expensive to put into a test and they also take time to have graded. These questions might be something like a drag and drop where they might sequence events in order from the story. Maybe they would do some hot spot highlighting where they actually highlight the correct answer from the passage. Or it could be a selection of multiple answers from a drop-down menu. Okay um I really feel like this question type assesses our kids and really gets their learning. As a third grade teacher oftentimes I felt like I was doing more test prep for some questions than I was in teaching the skill for that question. Um for instance on a sequencing question on NISA are in the past students would have to look through four answer choices with four series of events. But with a drag and drop question they can just simply order those events um and drag them and drop them in the correct order. So I think it simplifies that task and still gets it their learning. Let's take a look at what some of the others would look like. This first one is a fourth grade example and the students ask to select two pieces of evidence from the paragraph that support why Native Americans built TPs. Again it says select two. So we see that there this passage is actually bracketed. So students will click on the bracketed information they want highlighted and the whole bracket um goes ahead and highlights and shows that answer. So we're really having kids go back into the text and find evidence to improve their answer. On the next example here it's sixth grade again from the sampler and they said the chart uh you complete the chart to show which section of the passage supports each main idea. They would go ahead and click this bottom box and a new window will pop up where they're actually going to drag and drop. And so for this one they'll drag and drop the bolded words on the left into the chart at the right in the correct places. So again um we're having them complete that task in a little bit different way but we still get at their um high level meaning. Text dependent analysis. This is a written analysis reflection or ideas and opinions about one or two passages and it is scored with a rubric. This is probably the most different question type that we have on NISA. ELA from NISA are. Students are going to use either informational or literature passage or passages. Sometimes they have one passage to read sometimes they have two that they'll read and kind of compare. They're going to draw on some of those basic writing skills but they have to combine them with their reading skills like inferring and synthesizing. So again this gets at those standards that we can't assess with that though some reading standards without writing or some writing standards without reading. And students are going to be required to provide evidence from their passage so they're going to have to be used to going back into the passage or into their stories to reread and find evidence and include that in their writing. Each NISA test will have just one TDA on it so it is nice to know that because this one will take a little bit more time that you know there is just one protest. This is the rubric that will be used to score the TDAs. You can use it for your reference as you move forward with preparing your students and practicing writing some responses. We're not used to those constructed responses for the NISA test so do familiarize yourself with this rubric. And let's take a look at an example. This is again from NDE's sampler and this is an eighth grade example. So the students read a passage and then it said in the story oversleeping the author blends reality and fantasy. Analyze how this helps the reader identify with the main character. Write a well organized structured response using specific evidence from the story to support your answer. There is a specific format used when writing TDA questions. The first sentence will always state a fact about what is happening in the passage so this one said that the author blends reality and fantasy. The next one gives the students a task so this time they're going to analyze how this helps the reader identify with the main character and the last sentence will always be the same. Write a well organized structured response using specific evidence from the story to support your answer. Now that one last sentence has a lot of big words for kids in it but even I taught third grade students and I'm sure that once I taught them the meanings of those words and they were more comfortable with seeing that sentence they would be able to use it to help them write their response. Okay so let's take a look at some examples of what students have written and how it was scored using the rubric. Okay this first answer is a four rating. Again this is eighth grade. We notice that it is several paragraphs long and on the sampler there's actually an explanation for each the scoring of each writing piece. So I'll read you just a few sentences it goes into more depth and is a little bit longer and you'll be able to access that when you go to the sampler yourself. This is this response demonstrates exemplary analysis of text use of evidence and writing skills. The response addresses all parts of the task thoroughly explaining how the author blends reality and fantasy to help the reader identify with the main character and provides purposeful thorough analysis and relevant text support from the passage to show how the exciting fantasy world of dreams would be no substitute for the more normal reality with family and friends. Again it continues on but we see that this response is very thorough it is very complete it addressed all parts of the question and that's why the student received the full score of four. Now let's take a look at a three rating. We notice it is a little bit smaller however we've been assured that it really isn't length that's important with these answers it's that content is more important so I know a lot of kids and sometimes even their teachers get hung up on how long something has to be but we really need to not focus on length but rather that content. We do notice at the bottom of this screen too there is a word count. Students are allowed up to six thousand words however this assessment department realizes that's probably way too much we just know that right now students are not limited on their responses. So let's take a look at this three rating. If you pause you can go ahead and read this response and then I'll just go ahead and give you the explanation for the scoring. This response demonstrates effective analysis of text use of evidence and writing skills. The response addresses the task of explaining how the author blends reality and fantasy to help the reader identify with the main character. Okay it goes on from there also but you might notice that in that first sentence they really focus on again just like on the four response analysis of the text use of the evidence and writing skills. It's important that your students will be able to focus on those three areas on their responses too. Okay let's go on and take a look at the two rating. We notice this is much shorter. Again length isn't the most important part but content is more important. The explanation of this score says this response demonstrates partially effective analysis of text use of evidence and writing skills while it addresses parts of the task a large portion of the response consists of a personal account of a dream about playing soccer. So instead of going to the story for evidence this student focused on their own life and their own experience and we need them to focus on the text and the evidence presented in that text so they received a partial score. And this is an example of a one rating. The explanation on the sampler site says this response demonstrates limited analysis of text use of evidence and writing skills. The response minimally addresses the task inadequately analyzes the text provides little relevant evidence from the passage to support a claim and demonstrates limited understanding of the text. So again everything here was pretty much limited we got little response out of the student and again though the explanation focuses on analysis of the text use of evidence and writing skills. So that's something that you will really want to talk to your students about and have them practice. So now that we've talked about all of the question types we need to talk about when all of these changes are taking place. Well our fifth through eighth grades and eleventh grade will have a two-year transition. This year the test will just have some field tested items and they will not count towards their score but the test will be fully transitioned in 2017. So by next spring they will have that new NISA ELA test. In grades three and four it's a little bit longer transition a three-year transition. So this year 2016 NISA will look the same as previous years. In 2016 they will also third and fourth grade classes can have the option of pilot testing. Now the pilot test has the new answer types and can be given after your other NISA tests are taken. Okay so after your other language arts and math test you can do the pilot and it will give the state some good feedback about what our third grade and fourth grade students where they are right now and what skills they have. So it's highly recommended that your school signs up to take this pilot. In 2017 third and fourth graders will have the field tested items and then they will be fully transitioned by 2018. So again for five eight and eleven it's a two-year transition for grades three and four it's a three-year transition. And one thing to think about and that a lot of schools have had concerns about is the portion that they will need to type for the TDA. Now many schools are looking at their keyboarding programs and trying to get those third and fourth graders ready to type more and type longer responses but also know that the TDA can be handwritten first and then typed into the computer. So that's an important consideration that I think will help them so that they don't have to type as they're doing all their processing and looking back into the text for the evidence. They can handwrite first and then go to the computer and type. So after all of this what happens if you still need a little bit more help? Well we have some great resources available to us. NDE's assessment page has excellent resources. This is a link to the page. There you will find presentations that have been given throughout the state on this transition. You will also find samplers of the questions for each grade level. Also table of specifications has been updated and the nice thing about this table of specifications is it uses the new standards and also lists for each of those standards the question types that would be possible for that standard. There's also a standards crosswalk that shows the differences between the 2009 and 2014 standards. To access this page you can either click on the link if you're on my presentation or use the web address that I've listed and to get to my presentation here you can go to the ESU 8 homepage, click on departments, professional development and then content areas. This presentation is listed under the reading slash English language arch page. Also I'll be offering some future webinars. We're going to be looking closer into TDA and how students are going to need to write those text dependent analysis. They will need to have close reading skills to be able to do a TDA and so we'll look at both of those areas in more depth in future webinars so please check your inbox for our announcements on those and then always please feel free to email me. I would love to help you with any questions or any topics that may come up and if you have a question somebody else might too so it really helps us all out if you let me know how I can help you out in preparing for these changes to NISA. Best of luck to you and I'm very excited for your students and you to have these new question types and great resources available to you.