School Improvement in Maryland

This Week’s MSA Item

MSA Items of the week can be used in a variety of ways by teachers, students, parents, tutors and other interested parties. They may be used as warm-up activity at the beginning of the class or as a review at the end of instruction. Students and parents can use them as an ongoing review to ensure that students have mastered and retained the content they are expected to learn.

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Use your mouse to select a grade from the subject categories below. This week’s MSA Item for that category will appear at right.

Reading:

Mathematics:

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Student Handout with Answer Key, and Objective Information.

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Monitoring Reports

Students can keep a record of their progress on these assessment items by using the Monitoring Report, a tool that lists of of the grade level objectives assessed on MSA. The Monitoring Report contains space for entering multiple assessment results and diagnostic comments.

Monitoring Report for Reading Grade 8

MSA Item of the Week

This item is one of the many resources available in the Reading VSC Toolkit.

Reading Grade 8

Read this passage from 'Dear Mr. President Thomas Jefferson Letters from a Philadelphia Bookworm', a novel that takes place when President Jefferson was in office. Amelia Hornsby has grown up in Philadelphia but has recently followed her father, a doctor, to Pittsburgh. Then answer the following.

Read this sentence from paragraph 2 of the letter.

Yet, if they do come to Pittsburgh, we shall not fail to celebrate these titans of exploration.

The word in paragraph 2 that most helps a reader understand the meaning of titans is

  1. entourage
  2. progress
  3. heroes
  4. banquets

View answer and objective assessed

/share/assessment_items/xml/items/msa_ela_8_029.xml