The assessment
What is assessed — reading
Two texts, sixteen questions, and a rubric that turns on one habit.
It draws on Grades 1 to 3, not just Grade 3. The focus is Grade 3 expectations, but questions may involve content from Grades 1 and 2. A gap left unclosed in Grade 2 can surface here.
Some expectations cannot be assessed this way, and EQAO says so. Anything requiring a teacher to watch a child do something — reading aloud with expression, explaining which planning strategy helped — is marked in the blueprint as unmeasurable by a large-scale assessment. Those expectations still matter; they are the classroom teacher's to judge.
The three skills
Stated plainly in the Framework:
- Understanding explicitly stated information and ideas — it is in the text, findable
- Understanding implicitly stated information and ideas — inference
- Responding to a reading selection by making connections, bringing the reader's own knowledge and experience to the text
That is the whole of it. Not fluency, not decoding speed, not book knowledge.
The blueprint
Two texts, and their lengths are specified — which is useful to know.
| Text | Length | Selected-response | Open-response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narrative | 450–500 words | 10 | 1 |
| Informational | 200–250 words | 4 | 1 |
| Totals | — | 14 | 2 |
The narrative text carries more than twice the weight of the informational one. Eleven of the sixteen reading questions hang off a single story of 450 to 500 words. If a child is going to be taught to read one thing carefully, it is a story of about that length.
Score points — 27 in total
Note that 14 selected-response questions yield 19 points. Some are worth more than one — the multi-part ones, where a child drags three items into place and can be partly right. Partial credit exists, so attempting all parts of a multi-part question is materially better than attempting one.
The open-response questions, decoded
Two of them, one per text, both worth four points, scored by trained educators against a public rubric. The gap between a 2 and a 3 is not about how much a child writes.
| Code | What it means |
|---|---|
| B | Blank |
| I | Restates the question · illegible · not in English · irrelevant · off topic |
| 10 | Attempts to explain. Answers only part of the question, or offers support that is inaccurate, or makes no reference to the text |
| 20 | Partial understanding. Support from the text is vague, thin or off-target. The reader has to connect the support to the point themselves |
| 30 | Understanding shown. Some accurate and relevant support, possibly alongside vaguer material. The reader still has to make some connections |
| 40 | Full explanation with specific and relevant support |
It is entirely about whether the child does the connecting work, or leaves it to the reader. A response that quotes the right line but never says why it matters lands at 20. The same response plus “which shows that she was nervous” lands at 30 or 40.
The instructional move is one sentence, taught to automaticity: evidence, then “which shows that…”
Not one point — it is coded I, alongside blank and off-topic. Children taught to “start your answer by turning the question around” need to be taught that the restatement is scaffolding, not an answer. Something must follow it.
Which expectations are in play
From the 2023 Language curriculum. Strand A is not assessed at all. Neither is B1, oral and non-verbal communication.
Strand B — Foundations of Language
B2.1 | Phonics knowledge — blending, segmenting, correcting approximations |
B2.2 | Orthographic knowledge — spelling choices, position-based patterns |
B2.3 | Morphological knowledge — bases, prefixes, suffixes |
B2.4 | Vocabulary — including using morphology to work out new words in context |
B2.5 | Reading fluency (largely unmeasurable at scale) |
B3.1 | Syntax — simple, compound and complex sentences with adverbial clauses |
B3.2 | Grammar — possessive nouns, linking verbs, progressive tense, interrogative adjectives and adverbs, prepositions, interjections |
B3.3 | Capitalisation and punctuation — capitals in dialogue and titles, commas and quotation marks for direct speech, apostrophes for contractions |
The most common vocabulary question gives a word from the passage and asks what it means here. The skill is not a memorised definition — it is using the surrounding sentence plus the word's parts. A child who has practised un-help-ful-ly as a system has a method. A child who has only learned word lists has a lottery ticket.
Strand C — Comprehension
C1.1 | Comprehending texts using words, grammar, cohesive ties, sentence structure, background knowledge |
C1.2 | Text forms and genres — characteristics of literary and informational forms |
C1.3 | Text patterns and features — order of importance, cause and effect; headings, indexes — and how they help the reader |
C1.4 | Visual elements — images, graphics, visual design, and their purpose |
C1.5 | Elements of style — voice, word choice, word patterns, sentence structure |
C1.6 | Point of view — first person or third person, and alternatives |
C1.7 | Indigenous contexts of various text forms |
C2.1–C2.2 | Activating prior knowledge; identifying purpose for reading |
C2.3 | Predictions — made from background knowledge, text features and evidence, then adjusted |
C2.4–C2.5 | Monitoring understanding; making connections |
C2.6 | Main idea and important details in sequence |
C2.7 | Reflecting on strategies (largely unmeasurable at scale) |
C3.1 | Literary devices — including metaphor and assonance |
C3.2 | Making inferences from stated and implied information |
C3.3 | Analysing texts — main and supporting ideas, sequencing, comparing and contrasting |
C3.4–C3.5 | Cultural elements; explicit and implicit perspectives |
C3.6 | Personal response to ideas in texts |
C3.7–C3.8 | Indigenous contexts; reflecting on thinking skills |
In the blueprint, B3 shares B2's question allocation and C3 shares C2's — they are not separately counted. C3 is assessed, and it contains inference (C3.2) and text analysis (C3.3), two of the highest-value skills in the component. Do not read the absence of a separate row as an absence of questions.
Counts: C1 carries 3 selected-response on the narrative and 1 on the informational; C2 and C3 together carry 4 and 1. The two open-response questions sit within the C2/C3 block. Strand B (B2 + B3) carries 3 on the narrative and 2 on the informational.
C3.2 inference · C2.6 main idea · C1.3 text features and why they help. If a term's reading instruction had to be reduced to three questions asked over and over, they would be: What does this make you think, and which words told you? · What is this mostly about? · Why did the writer put a heading there?