Effective Lit. Website Review#6

Diopulos Diopulos

ED638-40

Dr. M. Rivera

Effective Lit. Website Review#6 

ThinkCERCA (thinkcerca.com) is founded by Eileen Murphy, a classroom English teacher who left teaching to find ways to address student success in this ever-changing world. She realized that students are not given the right tools to be more productive and prolific. She believes that students need to be critical thinkers by being able to independently evaluate and synthesize information as well as construct and communicate thoughts effectively. So in order for students to have these set of skills, students need to be exposed to higher quality technology solutions.

ThinkCERCA platform was developed in 2012. It is a literacy framework that provides accommodations for student to engage in critical thinking through argumentative writing. By doing this, students read passages, find evidences, make claims, and share their findings. CERCA is an acronym used for 5 key components Claim, Evidence, Reasoning, Counterargument, and Audience. ThinkCERCA is a differentiated approach to instruction in which students develops skills in close reading and also encourages writing across contents.

The main purpose for ThinkCERCA is for students to read, write, and grow. According to recent research,  ThinkCERCA have shown that students literacy growth can be 1.5 or 2.5 years of growth per year.  The outcome of this extraordinary growth is the result of 10 applied reading and writing lessons per student per year.

ThinkCERCA features a CMS where teachers can create classes, uses and explores ThinkCERCA resources, create folders, and assign benchmarks or leveling assessments. It also contains a library and that it is the only personalized literacy platform that has all the four core subjects.