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them compose their own texts. The frames comprise the different types of writing tests ask students to produce: narrative, analytic, informative, argumentative, and comparative. Scorers typically evaluate student responses to these items on the basis of both content and quality of writing rather than the ability to simply produce a correct answer. While the time required to complete and score these items precludes test makers from including many of them on large-scale assessments, the low frequency of this item type is somewhat deceptive relative to its importance. In real terms, writing ability is a core component of a student’s overall proficiency in ELA, and even in terms of assessment results themselves, a single item of this type is likely to be weighted far more heavily than a single selectedresponse or short constructed-response item.
Mathematics The mathematics analysis drew on items from PARCC, SBAC, NAEP, SAT, and ACT. Because of the variety in secondary course progressions across schools and districts, items at the high school level were placed together in one large group. Items from the SAT and ACT were analyzed separately due to differences in the designs and uses of those tests. Like ELA, a large portion of the mathematics items consisted of two or more parts. Unlike ELA, we found that these multiple parts typically asked questions that were significantly distinct from one another. Whereas the second part of an ELA item might ask a student to explain or support his or her answer to the first part, the successive parts of a mathematics item often asked students to perform new calculations within the same mathematical scenario, sometimes requiring the use of entirely different skills. Because of the heterogeneity in multipart items, we decided to analyze these distinct parts separately, resulting in a total of 2,629 mathematics items. Also in contrast to the ELA analysis, we found the mathematics items displayed extreme diversity in terms of item format, leading us to categorize items primarily by content rather than form. Many items asked students to draw on multiple areas of mathematical content in solving a problem, and in such cases, we categorized the item by what raters considered its most prominent content. We identified nine broad content categories, further divided into a total of sixty subcategories. Almost 70 percent of the items belonged to the categories of expressions, equations, inequalities, and functions (EEIF); operations; or geometry. As expected, different grade levels displayed an emphasis on different categories, with operations peaking in grades 3–5 and EEIF rising to prominence in the secondary grades.
Science Because the consortia-built assessments (PARCC and SBAC) that comprised the bulk of our mathematics and ELA analyses did not include science, we built the majority of our science analysis on publicly released items from available science tests from thirty-eight individual states and Washington, DC. We supplemented this analysis of 4,140 state test items with items from the NAEP and ACT, as well as two international tests—the Trends in
