Consortia Flesh Out Visions for Common Tests

By Catherine Gewertz

Ed Week

Common academic standards, adopted by nearly every state, lay out big shifts in expectations for teachers and students in mathematics and English/language arts. Now a new set of documents edges closer to offering a vision of how those standards might look in the classroom and on tests.

The documents were released by the two groups of states that are designing assessments for the new standards. One group, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC, released its “content maps and specifications” in English/language arts yesterday. The other, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, unveiled its “content frameworks” in both subjects last week.

Both documents serve to explicate the standards, highlighting key concepts or progressions of learning. PARCC’ s focuses on identifying the ideas that should be emphasized and how they could be grouped together, and SBAC’s describes the ways students should be able to prove that they have mastered the standards.

The documents can guide teachers and curriculum designers, but they also provide early signals to test-makers, who are eagerly awaiting the chance to bid on building the assessments specified by the consortia, which are financed with $360 million in federal Race to the Top grants. Requests for proposals on test design have not been issued yet, although SMARTER Balanced recently issued one seeking bids for the writing of detailed instructions for test-item development.

PARCC’s frameworks are open for public feedback until Aug. 17, and possibly later. The SMARTER Balanced specifications are open for a first round of comments until Aug. 29, and for a second round, on a revised draft, next month. SBAC plans to release math content specifications later this month for two rounds of feedback.

Teacher Aid

Consortia officials said that member states collaborated on the papers and had them reviewed by outside groups of teachers and other experts. Both consortia view the new documents as an important first plank in a bridge that begins with the standards and is built out by an array of entities—including states, school districts, teachers, nonprofits, and private-sector vendors—with instructional materials, professional development, test blueprints, and, finally, assessments.

“Many districts are already working on new curricula, and [the frameworks] can be a tool to help them do that,” said Laura M. Slover, PARCC’s senior vice president.

Joe Willhoft, the executive director of the SMARTER Balanced consortium, said its content specifications serve as “somewhat of a distillation of the standards [and] loose definitions of what the test will look like.”

Barbara A. Kapinus, a senior policy analyst with the National Education Association who reviewed the PARCC content frameworks, said the documents could be useful for individual teachers as they plan how to teach the standards, but also in building learning communities of teachers.

“Some of us can look at the standards and picture what our classroom would look like for a year, but a lot of people can’t,” she said. “I think it’s exciting. [With the content frameworks], I can see pulling teachers together to develop more specific units of study, filling in the texts students might read. Not just isolated lesson plans, but ...

Click to continue reading.

Coverage of “deeper learning” that will prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a rapidly changing world is supported in part by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, at www.hewlett.org.