Mississippi College‐ and Career‐Readiness Standards (MSCCRS) for English Language Arts
OVERVIEW
The Mississippi College‐ and Career‐Readiness Standards (MS CCRS) for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (“the Standards”) are the culmination of an extended, broad‐based effort to fulfill the charge to create next generation K–12 standards in order to help ensure that all students are college and career ready in literacy
no later than the end of high school.
The Standards set requirements not only for English language arts (ELA) but also for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Just as students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, so too must the Standards specify the literacy skills and understandings required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines. Literacy standards for grade 6 and above are predicated on teachers of ELA, history/social studies, science, and technical subjects using their content area expertise to help students meet the particular challenges of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language in their respective fields. It is important to note that the 6–12 literacy standards in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are not meant to replace content standards in those areas but rather to supplement them.
As a natural outgrowth of meeting the charge to define college and career readiness, the Standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty‐first century. Indeed, the skills and understandings students are expected to demonstrate have wide applicability outside the classroom or workplace. Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally.
They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high‐quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews. They reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic. In short, students who meet the Standards develop the skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening that are the foundation for any creative and purposeful expression in language.
The Mississippi College‐ and Career‐Readiness (MS CCRS) standards anchor the document and define general, cross‐disciplinary literacy expectations that must be met for students to be prepared to enter college and workforce training programs ready to succeed. The K–12 grade‐ specific standards define end‐of‐year expectations and a cumulative progression designed to enable students to meet college and career readiness expectations no later than the end of high school. The MS CCRS and high school (grades 9–12) standards work in tandem to define the college and career readiness line—the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity. Hence, both should be considered when developing college and career readiness assessments. Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade specific standards, retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades, and work steadily toward meeting the more general expectations described by the MS CCRS standards.
Grade Levels for K–8; Grade Bands for 9–10 and 11–12
The Standards use individual grade levels in kindergarten through grade 8 to provide useful specificity; the Standards use two‐year bands in grades 9–12 to allow flexibility in high school course design.
A Focus on Results Rather than Means
By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for school districts to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards.
An Integrated Model of Literacy
Although the Standards are divided into Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language strands for conceptual clarity, the processes of communication are closely connected, as reflected throughout this document. For example, Writing standard 9 requires that students be able to write about what they read. Likewise, Speaking and Listening standard 4 sets the expectation that students will share findings from their research. Research and Media Skills Blended into the Standards as a Whole To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and non‐print texts in media forms old and new. Research, media skills, and understandings are embedded throughout the Standards rather than treated in a separate section.
Shared Responsibility for Students’ Literacy Development
The Standards insist that instruction in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language be a shared responsibility within the school. The K–5 standards include expectations for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language applicable to a range of subjects, including but not limited to ELA. The grades 6–12 standards are divided into two sections, one for ELA and the other for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This division reflects the unique, time‐honored place of ELA teachers in developing students’ literacy skills while at the same time recognizing that teachers in other areas must have a role in this development as well. Part of the motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy promulgated by the Standards is extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas. Most of the required reading in college and workforce training programs is informational in structure and challenging in content; postsecondary education programs typically provide students with both a higher volume of such reading than is generally required in K–12 schools and comparatively little scaffolding. The Standards are not alone in calling for a special emphasis on informational text. The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades.
Strategies for Content Area Reading
Though strategies utilized in reading and language arts classes provide the framework that students need to comprehend content‐specific texts, students must also be equipped with transferable skills and strategies that can be used across grade levels and curricula. The following are suggestions for content area reading that can be incorporated in all classrooms.
Suggestions for Teaching Content‐Specific Vocabulary and Facilitating Comprehension
Establish goals and purposes for reading.
Plan pre‐reading activities that allow students to develop prerequisite knowledge and vocabulary about content‐specific topics. Activities may include reading materials, videos, websites, and field trips.
Plan post‐reading activities that allow students to demonstrate mastery of skills and concepts through visual, kinesthetic, oral, and/or written products. Comprehension is often aided when linked to the creation of a product.
Create mental or visual images associated with technical vocabulary words.
Link new vocabulary with background knowledge.
Focus on the semantic relationships of new and familiar words.
Use synonyms, antonyms, and dictionary definitions to understand the meaning of specialized and technical vocabulary.
Analyze the structure of new words (affixes, compound words, etc.) to determine word meaning.
Maintain word banks and word walls for new words
(Note: Word banks and word walls should be interactive; students must regularly interact with words banks and word walls to fully expand their vocabulary and analyze how words and concepts aid in reading comprehension).
Use semantic gradients (vocabulary continuums) to illustrate a continuum of words by degree. Semantic gradients often feature antonyms or opposites on each end of the continuum. This strategy broadens students’ knowledge of related and opposite words.
Develop activities that allow students to work collaboratively to figure out the meaning of new words.
Encourage students to generate and ask questions of texts.
Design activities that allow students to make inferences, predict, summarize, and visualize concepts.
Examine physical features of texts, such as different kinds of text features, including typeface, headings, and subheadings.
Many of the suggested strategies (e.g., prediction, summarizing, analyzing text features) must be directly taught (explicit instruction) and practiced, while other strategies (e.g., creating visual or mental images) can be components of incidental (implicit) instruction. Additionally, students must engage in reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities that are authentic and content‐specific. Textbooks and discipline‐specific texts, such as primary and secondary source documents, articles, tables, and graphs, must be cornerstones in social studies, science, and technical subjects to aid students in using reading strategies that are discipline‐specific.
(Adapted from Research‐Based Content Area Reading Instruction, Texas Reading Initiative, Guidance for Literacy in the Content Areas, Engage NY, and Vocabulary Filters: A Framework for Choosing Which Words to Teach)
