What is the RACE Strategy?
So, just what is the RACE strategy? RACE is an acronym that helps students remember which steps and in which order to write a constructed response.
R= Restate the Question
The first step is to change the question into a statement. This is also known as restating the question. Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why and then restate the keywords.
For example, if the question was, “Why did Jill decide to give her mother a jewelry box?” the answer would start this way, “Jill decided to give her mother a jewelry box because.”
A = Answer the Question
After restating the question, the second step is to finish the sentence and answer the question.
Students may use their knowledge and inferences from the text to identify the answer.
Here are a few tips for this.
1) Students must answer the specific question being asked.
2) Students also need to answer every part of the question. Sometimes questions have more than one part.
3) They need to list the character’s name before using a pronoun like he/she/they.
C = Cite Text Evidence
Citing evidence is the tricky part.
First, kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer. This evidence should be found in the text. Then, they must write it correctly using a sentence stem
According to the text…
Tell how the text evidence proves your point.
Here are a few examples of sentence starters that help you begin to Explain:
So, just what is the RACE strategy? RACE is an acronym that helps students remember which steps and in which order to write a constructed response.
R= Restate the Question
The first step is to change the question into a statement. This is also known as restating the question. Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why and then restate the keywords.
For example, if the question was, “Why did Jill decide to give her mother a jewelry box?” the answer would start this way, “Jill decided to give her mother a jewelry box because.”
A = Answer the Question
After restating the question, the second step is to finish the sentence and answer the question.
Students may use their knowledge and inferences from the text to identify the answer.
Here are a few tips for this.
1) Students must answer the specific question being asked.
2) Students also need to answer every part of the question. Sometimes questions have more than one part.
3) They need to list the character’s name before using a pronoun like he/she/they.
C = Cite Text Evidence
Citing evidence is the tricky part.
First, kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer. This evidence should be found in the text. Then, they must write it correctly using a sentence stem
According to the text…
- The author stated…
- In the second paragraph…
- The author mentioned…
- On the third page…
- The text stated…
- Based on the text…
Tell how the text evidence proves your point.
Here are a few examples of sentence starters that help you begin to Explain:
- This shows
- This proves
- This is a good example of
- This means that