Spent the day in Lansing today learning about the Common Core and the future of testing in the State of Michigan (and many other states as well). One of the presenters was Dr. Joe Willhoft, Executive Director of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
Dr. Willhoft gave an overview of the Smarter Balanced Assessment that Michigan has committed to implementing beginning with 2014/15 school year. The goal is to produce a testing system that will not only allow for state accountability, but will also allow teachers access to formative testing in order to assist in preparing students to be college and career ready. The Summative Assessment (state accountability test) will consist of two parts: a computer adaptive test and performance tasks. The computer adaptive test will be completed on-line and is intended to adapt to the individual student's responses - if the student answers an item correctly, the system will generate a question that is intended to measure a higher level skill. The idea is to get a very specific progress measure for each student. The performance tasks will be project like items that require students to access and apply information to solve problems in isolation and in groups.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment System is intended to measure the College and Career Readiness of our students. As a result, the test will be MUCH more rigorous than current state assessments. Bottom line - we have to expect more of our students and we have to start doing more to prepare them for College and Career Readiness.
Click the link below if you would like more information on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium - you can also sign up for a monthly e-newsletter at this site:
http://www.smarterbalanced.org/
Dr. Willhoft gave an overview of the Smarter Balanced Assessment that Michigan has committed to implementing beginning with 2014/15 school year. The goal is to produce a testing system that will not only allow for state accountability, but will also allow teachers access to formative testing in order to assist in preparing students to be college and career ready. The Summative Assessment (state accountability test) will consist of two parts: a computer adaptive test and performance tasks. The computer adaptive test will be completed on-line and is intended to adapt to the individual student's responses - if the student answers an item correctly, the system will generate a question that is intended to measure a higher level skill. The idea is to get a very specific progress measure for each student. The performance tasks will be project like items that require students to access and apply information to solve problems in isolation and in groups.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment System is intended to measure the College and Career Readiness of our students. As a result, the test will be MUCH more rigorous than current state assessments. Bottom line - we have to expect more of our students and we have to start doing more to prepare them for College and Career Readiness.
Click the link below if you would like more information on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium - you can also sign up for a monthly e-newsletter at this site:
http://www.smarterbalanced.org/
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