Standard 3: Listening & Reading

As listeners and readers, students will analyze experiences, ideas, information, and issues presented by others using a variety of established criteria. As speakers and writers, they will present, in oral and written language and from a variety of perspectives, their opinions and judgments on experiences, ideas, information and issues.

Key Idea:

Listening & Reading to analyze and evaluate experiences, ideas, information, and issues requires using evaluative criteria from a variety of perspectives and recognizing the difference in evaluations based on different sets of criteria.

Elementary

• read and form opinions about a variety of literary and informational texts and presentations, as well as persuasive texts such as advertisements, commercials, and letters to the editor
• make decisions about the quality and dependability of texts and experiences based on some criteria, such as the attractiveness of the illustrations and appeal of the characters in a picture book, or the logic and believability of the claims made in an advertisement
• recognize that the criteria that one uses to analyze and evaluate anything depend on one’s point of view and purpose for the analysis
• evaluate their own strategies for reading and listening critically (such as recognizing bias or false claims, and understanding the difference between fact and opinion) and adjust those strategies to understand the experience more fully

Intermediate

• analyze, interpret, and evaluate information, ideas, organization, and language from academic and nonacademic texts, such as textbooks, public documents, book and movie reviews, and editorials
• assess the quality of texts and presentations, using criteria related to the genre, the subject area, and purpose (e.g., using the criteria of accuracy, objectivity, comprehensiveness, and understanding of the game to evaluate a sports editorial)
• understand that within any group there are many different points of view depending on the particular interests and values of the individual, and recognize those differences in perspective in texts and presentations (e.g., in considering whether to let a new industry come into a community, some community members might be enthusiastic about the additional jobs that will be created while others are concerned about the air and noise pollution that could result)
• evaluate their own and others’ work based on a variety of criteria (e.g., logic, clarity, comprehensiveness, conciseness, originality, conventionality) and recognize the varying effectiveness of different approaches

Commencement

• analyze, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, organization, and language of a wide range of general and technical texts and presentations across subject areas, including technical manuals, professional journals, political speeches, and literary criticism
• evaluate the quality of the texts and presentations from a variety of critical perspectives within the field of study (e.g., using both Poe’s elements of a short story and the elements of “naturalist fiction” to evaluate a modern story)
• make precise determinations about the perspective of a particular writer or speaker by recognizing the relative weight he/she places on particular arguments and criteria (e.g., one critic condemns a biography as too long and rambling; another praises it for its accuracy and never mentions its length)
• evaluate and compare their own and others’ work with regard to different criteria and recognize the change in evaluations when different criteria are considered to be more important

• Standard 3: Speaking and Writing