This category of items assesses students’ ability to recognize and correct errors in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

This category of items assesses students’ ability to use the basic components of grammar, such as agreement, word choice, and tense.

This category of items assesses students’ ability to recognize the correct and effective use of complete sentences, transitions, sentence structure, conjunctions, and modifiers.

This category of items assesses the students’ ability to recognize main ideas and details in areas such as the author’s use of themes, details, opinions, relationships, and setting within the text to communicate his or her ideas to the reader.

This category of items assesses students’ ability to think beyond the literal meaning of the text by addressing such skills as drawing conclusions, making predictions, determining relationships, and determining the author’s purpose.

This category of items assesses students’ ability to analyze and interpret the author’s use of language in areas such as purpose, tone, word choice, figurative language, and stylistic devices.