Definitions of Content Clusters
| Overview | Writing | Speaking | Listening | Reading | Viewing | Extending Understanding |

The ESPA, GEPA, and HSPA will invite students to approach text^a (written, aural, and visual) with three different perspectives: interpreting text, analyzing and critiquing text, and extending understanding of the text.

LISTENING (p.18)
Listening, an integral part of everyday life, establishes a solid foundation for critical thinking, learning, and communicating.  Effective listeners are able to restate, interpret, respond to, and evaluate increasingly complex aural messages.

During this component of the assessment, students will actively listen to anecdotal or reflective texts of between 800 and 1200 words and respond to open-ended and multiple-choice questions. Selected texts will introduce topics that are consistent with the topics presented in other sections of the assessment unit and for the GEPA and HSPA will be drawn from previously published essays, biographies, personal narratives, and other nonfiction sources. Fourth graders will listen to a short narrative.

These full or excerpted texts will be recorded on audiotape and will contain the following
elements:

.    topics that are age- and grade-level appropriate;
.    a clear focus;
.    a clearly identifiable theme or central idea;
.    an established tone and/or mood of the passage;
.    key details that support and develop the theme or central idea;
.    a range of vocabulary for which adequate context is provided