Using the RACE Strategy for Text Evidence

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R = Restate the Question

The first step is to change the question into a statement. Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why but restate the keywords in the question.

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 own knowledge as well as inferences from the text to identify the answer.

A few tips for this…Number one, it’s important that they make sure to answer the specific question being asked. Number two, they also need to answer every part of the question. Sometimes questions have more than one part. Finally, they need to list the character’s name first, before using a pronoun like he/she/they.

C = Cite Text Evidence

This is the tricky part. First kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer. Then they need to write it correctly using a sentence stem, like… According to the text… or The author stated… or In the second paragraph, the author mentioned… or On the third page, the text stated… or Based on the text… and so on.

I make an anchor chart with these stems and put them up when we’re first starting to work on citing evidence. Once kids get a few of these memorized, it makes this part of the RACE strategy go much more smoothly. I do make sure students know to quote the text exactly as it is written and to use quotation marks correctly too.

E = Explain What it Means

The last part of the constructed response is where kids tell how their text evidence proved their point. Again, some simple sentence starters help kids stay on track here. Those include…This shows… or This proves… or This is a good example of… or This means that… and so on.