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ACT College and Career Readiness Standards - Reading · ACT 2023
Key Ideas and Details (KID): These questions require you to read texts closely to determine central ideas and themes; summarize information and ideas accurately; and understand sequential, comparative, and cause-effect relationships.
Identify important details and facts in a passage.
Paraphrase or restate information explicitly stated in a passage.
Draw simple inferences and conclusions based on information in a passage.
Determine the main idea or theme of a paragraph or a short passage.
Summarize key supporting details in a passage.
Understand sequential relationships (e.g., order of events) in a passage.
Understand comparative relationships (e.g., similarities and differences) in a passage.
Understand cause-effect relationships in a passage.
Determine the main idea or theme of a longer, more complex passage.
Draw more complex inferences and conclusions, requiring synthesis of information from different parts of a passage.
Understand how specific details contribute to the development of a central idea or theme.
Craft and Structure (CS): These questions require you to determine word and phrase meanings; analyze an author’s word choice rhetorically; analyze text structure; understand the author’s purpose and perspective; and analyze characters’ points of view. You will also be asked to differentiate between fact and opinion.
Determine the meaning of common words and phrases in context.
Understand how an author's word choice affects meaning and tone.
Identify the author's purpose (e.g., to inform, to persuade, to entertain) in a passage.
Identify the author's point of view or perspective.
Understand how specific sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text relate to each other and to the whole.
Determine the meaning of more complex or discipline-specific words and phrases in context, including figurative language.
Analyze how specific word choices contribute to the development of tone, mood, or style.
Analyze the overall structure of a text (e.g., chronological, problem-solution, comparison-contrast).
Understand how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text or order events create specific effects.
Analyze how differences in the points of view of characters or the narrator create effects such as suspense or humor.
Differentiate between fact and opinion in a text.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas (IKI): These questions require you to understand authors’ claims, differentiate between facts and opinions, and use evidence to make connections between different texts that are related by topic. Some questions will require you to analyze how authors construct arguments, evaluating reasoning and evidence from various sources.
Identify an author's claim or argument in a passage.
Identify evidence an author uses to support a claim.
Make simple comparisons between information or ideas in different parts of a single passage.
Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text.
Assess the relevance and sufficiency of evidence used to support claims.
Analyze how an author constructs an argument, including the use of rhetorical devices.
Compare and contrast how two texts address similar themes or topics.
Analyze how two or more texts address related ideas, including identifying areas of agreement and disagreement.
Integrate information from multiple texts or sources to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.
Evaluate the reasoning and evidence presented in different texts on the same topic.