TDA
Text Dependent Analysis
Looking for TDA materials in one place rather than spending all night Googling?
I’ve compiled several resources from different states and locations online into ONE place to make this easier for Middle School English Language Arts Teachers in TDA states!
1) Here’s a collection of three passages with a TDA question for each passage (this is from Wisconsin, but the TDA questions all pretty much follow the same format with the way they’re written, regardless of what state you’re in).
I love how this one is set up because each passage/question provides a rubric for the score (4,3,2,1) and the best part is that it also has sample student essays for each of those scores. There are all kinds of things to do with this.
You could actually print out the student samples of the 1, 2, 3, 4 scores but don’t tell your students what the score was. Instead, have them work together to score them themselves and use the rubric to justify their scores. This helps them think about what it takes to go from a 2 to a 3 or from a 3 to a 4.
You could also not show them the student samples at all and instead have them read the passage and write their TDA. They could refer to the rubric to to score themselves, then go through the students scores of 1,2,3,4 and think about what score their own TDA would be. It’s good to talk about what it would take for them to move up one more level, like what would have to be changed or added or even omitted in their own writing to do this.
Click here for this resource and then look at the following:
Passage 1 (P. 12)
Passage 2 (P. 35)
Passage 3 (P. 54)
2) This resource is from Nebraska, and it’s a good one because you can select any grade level and see the passage, the TDA, sample student essays, and the rubric. I like this one because you can see the slight differences between 6th and 7th or between 7th and 8th.
3) This resource here has writing resources and information for grades 3 and up, but if you click here and then scroll down and click on PSSA Exemplars, that’s a good place to start. Even then, inside that particular folder, you’ll find a lot of items that you don’t need (like 3rd grade writing prompts) but you can still scroll through and look at the middle school level materials, so that’s helpful. You will also find multiple-choice questions with justifications for the right answers as well as the student essay TDA’s.
4) There’s a site called Writable and you can click here to check it out. It’s free for teachers and they just added TDA writing to their resources. They have tons of other types of writing, but you can click around and search for TDA specific resources and they have them! You have to create a teacher account to see everything, but it’s easy to set up and it’s free for teachers (I just logged in with Google and there was nothing else I had to do). But that’s another place for passages and questions for TDA.
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I had two members from my Middle School ELA Teachers Lesson Plan Community reach out to me (two in one week!!) so I thought if two people need this, then I bet more do, too!
Inside the membership lesson plan area, I’m adding to this list of TDA resources as I find them in order to build a small library of easy-to-access TDA materials . . . After all, why spend hours online Googling this stuff when you could have it all in one place!
Click here to learn more about the Middle School ELA Teachers Lesson Plan Membership and how you can save hours and hours of time each week with your lesson plans already done!
