Essay Rubric – Biology
Research Tools
The Integrated Learning Assessment (ILA) measures secondary student engagement and use of metacognitive and comprehension-supporting routines that help students to become self-monitoring and self-governing readers of history or science texts. The ILA also measures student achievement in these subject areas and in literacy.
As a performance-based assessment, the ILA integrates CRESST’s work on model-based assessment and explanation tasks with Reading Apprenticeship’s curriculum-embedded reading assessment, the CERA. Students read a set of complex, grade-level history or science texts, describe their reading and thinking processes, answer a set of comprehension questions, and do some writing on a topic that integrates information from these texts into a coherent essay. Scoring is based on a rubric and attends to students’ comprehension and conceptual understanding, and to students’ literacy and historical or scientific thinking and discourse processes.
ILA research tools include subject-related assessments and scoring guidance.
A version of this rubric is available for history.
