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Text-dependent questions DO:
• Draw the reader back to the text for explicit references and analysis.
• Require complex analysis of text, including where matters are left uncertain.
• Focus on difficult portions of the text in order to promote the highest levels of reading proficiency with high school level text.
• TDQs should be scaffolded in order to promote an understanding of how central ideas and themes build and interact with each other over the course of a text.
• Require the evaluation of the literary and historical significance of a wide range of important texts from a variety of genres and time periods.
• Require the analysis of the author's point-of-view, perspective, and/or purpose.
• Ask students to engage with rhetorical features in order to determine their contribution to the power and beauty of the text as a whole.
• Require the analysis of the text structure in exposition and argument, particularly regarding those elements that make the text clear, convincing, and engaging.
• Require students to delineate and evaluate reasoning in grade-level expository texts.
• Allow students to integrate and evaluate multiple texts and multiple sources of information in order to address a question or solve a problem.
• Promote analytical, written, and spoken communication about text.
• Elicit information from the text that is recall.
• Expect personal opinions from students.
• Draw upon irrelevant background information or prior knowledge.
• Prompt imaginative speculation.
• Require identification of text structure, author's purpose, or figurative language without higher levels of thinking such as analysis, synthesis, or evaluation.
• Backwards-designed in that all questions are crafted to allow students to stay focused on the central idea or theme in the text.
• Crucial for creating an overarching set of questions that build students' core understandings of the content.
• Critical for creating an appropriate culminating assessment.
• The most significant themes and central ideas that unfold over the course of the text.
• Significant words and phrases, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings and their impact on the text as a whole.
• Text structure that is clear, convincing, and engaging.
• High school students should no longer spend instructional time predicting, visualizing, connecting, or identifying when it comes to their primary interactions with text.
• TDQs require students to apply reading strategies but not directly refer to them when writing about or discussing the text.
• The readers' comprehension of the text drives the use of strategies.