Text Dependent Questions are a critical component in the Common Core State Standards. Students must be able to answer Text Dependent Questions—that is, questions which require students to use evidence from the text in order to answer them. They require students to dig deeply into the text to support an answer. In fact, a text dependent question cannot be answered without using the text; background knowledge and prior experiences should not be included or considered. Questions like “You just read about hurricanes. Have you ever experienced really bad weather?” are not dependent on the text—that is, they don’t require any words, phrases or other ideas from the text itself in order to answer them.

Text-dependent questions may be used for instruction or for assessment purposes.  They expect students to understand what the text explicitly states as well as make logical inferences that match that text evidence.  They do not require any information, connection, or ideas that the reader may draw from outside the text.

When crafting questions to meet the Common Core State Standards, we begin with Standard 1 in both Reading Literature (RL) and Reading Informational Text (RI). Standard 1 expects students to ask and answer questions as well as to be able to use text evidence to support their thinking about a text. Text Dependent Questions go beyond Standard 1 and address at least one other Standard. So, no matter what standard a question addresses, the question is also addressing standard 1 as well.  Questions should be text dependent, so all require students to revisit the text to find specific information to prove their answer.

In addition to guiding students to demonstrate understanding of the Common Core State Standards, text dependent questions should also promote higher level thinking. A question may be text dependent but still may not require a lot of inferencing or higher level thinking. A question such as, “What is the setting?” is text dependent because it requires students to go back and find a specific sentence or part of the text to identify the setting.  Perhaps students may have to infer the setting from clues, but this is still a lower level of cognitive demand.Often, text dependent questions are about a specific portion of a text; they require students to linger over a particular paragraph or section to gain meaning. Text Dependent Questions are purposeful; they are carefully crafted to guide students to closely read and deeply understand the text. Text Dependent Questions may have more than one correct answer as long as each answer can be well-supported by evidence in the text.

Questions may be text dependent, but not necessarily high level, rigorous questions.  A great model for selecting text dependent questions that require high level thinking is Bloom’s Taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom developed a Taxonomy of Thinking in 1956 that is still quite relevant today.  Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchy that categorizes levels of thinking. In 2001, Anderson revised Bloom’s Taxonomy to focus on the kinds of thinking needed at each of the levels. Bloom’s Taxonomy begins with simple knowledge level of remembering and increases in difficulty all the way to synthesizing ideas and creating new projects.  Questions can be developed to foster thinking at each of these levels. The goal is to ask questions that are both text dependent and get student to think at higher cognitive levels.

Check out the online resource on Text Dependent Questions & Bloom’s Taxonomy from my April 2015 article in LibrarySparks magazine!