The sixth-grade reading curriculum of most states tends to emphasize reading comprehension. Thus, many of the sixth-grade benchmarks in reading are related analyzing reading passages. For an IEP program, the benchmarks are changed to be slightly off-grade, meaning the student isn't required to follow the sixth-grade benchmarks exactly. Many of the benchmarks for abstract reasoning and attention to nuances in the reading are abandoned in favor of overall comprehension. For example, benchmarks relating to understanding the genre of a fiction passage or poem may be replaced by fifth-grade benchmarks for summarizing text passages as a whole.
Sixth-grade students are at the level at which writing is no longer difficult. At this level, schools tend to set benchmarks related to the quality of students’ writing, such as writing organized arguments and using advanced sentence structures. For IEP students, these benchmarks may be lessened, and writing production may still be in the foreground. Benchmarks related to quality will likely be more basic, as in using proper punctuation and knowing how to properly end and begin sentences.
Reading assessment for sixth-grade IEP students puts less emphasis on the linguistic details of a passage in favor of stronger emphasis on summarizing and inference skills. In an IEP reading assessment, the student may not need to be tested on concepts such as word roots, suffixes and idioms. A basic sixth-grade IEP reading assessment may contain one or more reading passages with reading comprehension questions.
Writing assessments for sixth-grade IEP students put much more weight on practicality -- that is demonstrating the ability to use writing skills in real life -- when compared to the assessments of the standard sixth-grade curriculum. For example, whereas a standard sixth-grade assessment may evaluate a student’s writing based on his ability to organize paragraphs, use facts to support opinions and use higher-level sentence structures, an IEP sixth-grade writing assessment may require the IEP student to focus on producing an essay, followed by a request for a second draft that corrects some of the student’s more-severe mistakes.