What?????? If you’ve been keeping up with SBAC, you’ve already seen this. If you’re one of our teaching colleagues in Michigan, make sure you download the vocabulary and integrate the information into the good work you are doing in your lessons.
Both SBAC and the MDE note that “Construct relevant vocabulary” refers to any English language arts term that students should know because it is essential to the construct of English language arts. As such, these terms should be part of instruction. These are words that may appear in assessment stems or options on the ELA M-STEP even though the EDL Core Vocabularies: Reading, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies (ISBN 1-55855-811-X) might identify these terms as above grade level for general use. Because these terms are part of instruction in the ELA classroom they are considered construct relevant and thus allowable for this use. The following list of “construct relevant vocabulary” was compiled by the ELA test development teams. This list is NOT intended to be a default vocabulary curriculum; instead, the list of terms is intended as an instructional resource to ensure that teachers remember to embed these terms into their instruction. The list is a working document; it is neither “finished” nor is it all-inclusive.”
The introduction in this document basically says to pay attention to the vocabulary in this document. It was released in Michigan on May 31, 2016 – just before summer vacation, so you may not have had the chance to loll over this during the summer. The beginning of the new school year is a good time to review the document and think about how you’ll use it in a way that fits within your lessons.
Below you can link to the whole document, or just the grade levels you need.
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Entire document, Grades 3-High School
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 3
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 4
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 5
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 6
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 7
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, Grade 8
MI Construct Relevant Vocabulary, High School