Defining Rigor

1. “Rigor is the goal of helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging.” -Strong, Silver, and Perini

2. “Rigor is a curriculum goal that is being pushed throughout education. It is meant to improve students’ ability to understand complex concepts, but sometimes is misunderstood to mean students should work with difficult concepts. Sometimes even the most difficult of subjects is not also a rigorous lesson. When teachers take some time to analyze their current lessons for rigor they can find where it is already present and were it might be added.” -Michal Zacharzewski

3. “Rigor means that students are challenged to understand and work with difficult concepts. They are challenged to make their own discoveries and expand their understanding about how the world works. When teachers take the time to examine their curriculum and target some lessons for more rigorous learning activities they empower their students to learn how to learn.” -Strong, Silver, and Perini

4. “Quality of thinking, not quantity, and that can occur in any grade and at any subject.” -Bogess

5. “High expectations are important, and must include effort on the part of the learner.” -Wasley, Hampel and Clark

6. “Deep immersion in a subject and should include real-world settings and working with an expert.” -Washor and Mojkowki

7. “Rigor would be used to say something about how an experience or activity is carried out and to what degree. Specifically, a rigorous experience would be one that involves depth and care as, for example, in a scientific experiment or literary analysis that is done thoughtfully, deeply with sufficient depth and attention to accuracy and detail.” -James Beane

8. Rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels. -Barbara R. Blackburn: “RIGOR is NOT a Four Letter Word”

© AZ Board of Regents, BEST Professional Development, 2012. All rights reserved. 9. Rigor is achieved through text complexity. Text complexity blends qualitative and quantitative measures with reader and task considerations; it has 3 dimensions: quantitative (How complex is the text?), qualitative (Why it is complex?), reader- task (What is the knowledge and capacity of the student?) [Common Core Standards – ELA]