How Context Clues are Assessed on STAAR

During a recent meeting with Gayla Wiggins and Lead4Ward, Gayla said, "Context clues are not assessed the way they are used." It blew my mind. I met with a group of friends to tease apart the ideas. Essentially, we decided that we are teaching context clues as a skill rather than as a process.

Using context is a metacognitive process, not a set of steps you go through to find out what a word means. Telling kids to look in the sentence to find the clues won't always work. Telling kids to look at the sentences before and after the word is used won't always work either. As a matter of fact, "the chances of using a single context to derive a word's meaning are slim (only about 15 percent of the time) and doing so often requires and extensive amount of inference" (Trainer notes, Reading to Learn Academy, Vocabulary, slide 19). That shocked me.

But it does make sense. Nuanced text hardly ever gives a single piece of evidence. Yet nuanced text does give multiple pieces of overarching context if you use the whole text to make meaning. To use my favorite example, we can't teach kids to answer vocabulary questions as if it were a Seek and Find on a Chili's children's menu. If kids are reading the question, then going to the text to find the word, reading "around" the word, that's not context. That's isolation. No amount of circling or highlighting is going to help the child understand the word. Nuanced text won't have enough information to help the reader understand the meaning of the word. Besides, reading isn't about understanding one word. Reading is about how all the words coalesce to deliver the author's message. Context clues aren't about understanding the words. Context clues are about how you use the words to understand the point of the text. Understanding one word is not -and hopefully will never be -the point of authentic writing or reading.

The following examples come from the 8th Grade 2017 Released Reading STAAR Exam.

Here's an example. The question asks students to look for a word found in paragraph 2. The evidence listed in the multiple choice items is also from paragraph 2.

But look at how much evidence is peppered THROUGHOUT the text supports the meaning of that word. Reading the ENTIRE text is the context. Not one sentence. Not one paragraph. By teaching kids to only look at a portion of the text without consideration of the meaning of the whole text is a bizarre test taking strategy to handcuff kids to certain misconceptions about context clues as well as how we are really supposed to use context in actual life. Again, the focus of reading this passage is not to understand what scant means. It's about something more important. 

And here's another example. Just because the word is in paragraph 5 doesn't limit the evidence and context to paragraph five. Understanding the WHOLE passage brings the reader meaning about how the word is used and connected to what the author is saying with this word. In this case, a secret strategy for success.

If I had the time, and thought you would read it, I'd record a think aloud about how each piece of highlighting helps me understand the words and the author's message. But, I don't have the time. And you probably didn't read all the way to the end anyway.