Common Core State Standards - Response

After reviewing the Common Core State Standards for reading, several thoughts came to mind.  I think that the standards are comprehensive, and they address all the essential skills students need to learn in school to be successful after they graduate.  If a student reaches all of these standards, then he or she would certainly be a very proficient reader.  I also liked how the standards have separate reading sections for literature and for informational texts.  There is obviously a lot of overlap between the two, but I think that it's important to recognize that there are different purposes for reading, and students may not have to read books, poems, and plays after they graduate, but they will certainly encounter informational texts and need to be able to understand them.  Reading is inescapable in our world, and I feel that the standards do an excellent job addressing this.

Another thought I had while I was reading the standards was the question of how students are going to be tested on these standards.  I would assume the standards would incorporate multiple choice responses, but I feel that this takes away from the subjective nature of literature.  These standards could be assessed through written responses, but that inherently ties students' reading abilities to their ability to write.  I realize that writing is another major part of the standards, but I wonder how these reading standards will be directly assessed (or if they will be directly assessed at all).  Furthermore, unless the standards mandate that certain novels and longer texts are read during certain years, there doesn't seem to be any way for us to assess students' abilities to comprehend novels or extended texts.  I understand that short stories and poems contain the same literary elements, but analyzing "the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements," and analyzing the development of themes "over the course of the text" both present a unique set of challenges for novels and longer works, and these challenges will most likely be overlooked.  I would agree that students who can understand short stories can most likely understand novels as well, but that may not always be the case.

Lastly, I also thought about how the standards don't appear to mandate what specifically needs to be read (for the most part).  A student's ability to learn and demonstrate these standards would obviously heavily depend on the text they are using to do so.  I think it's very good that the standards don't specifically mandate certain texts, but I think that it's important to be aware that the texts that teachers/districts use to teach these standards will greatly influence their students' abilities to learn them.