What Are Teachers' and School Leaders' Major Concerns About New K–12 State Tests?
The implementation of new consortia-based tests (Smarter Balanced and PARCC) has created concern among both educators and school leaders about increased test difficulty, score accuracy, technology, and educator readiness to prepare students for the new assessments. In this brief report, the authors...
Understanding Proficiency
Understanding Proficiency is a resource designed to support educators in analyzing and learning from student work on performance tasks in English language arts and math. The site features actual scored student responses to the Smarter Balanced performance tasks, with annotations from practicing...
Academic Word Finder
Academic Word Finder is a tool to support educators interested in identifying academic vocabulary words in text. The tool is designed to identify tier two words from a given text. To use the tool, educators upload text selections that they wish to analyze. Once text analysis is complete, word lists...
‘Both and’ Literacy Instruction K-5: A Proposed Paradigm Shift for the Common Core State Standards ELA Classroom
This article proposes a language arts curriculum congruent to the new, English/language arts (ELA) college and career ready standards, particularly to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The idea of behind "'both and' literacy instruction" is that all of the following elements are needed for...
The 5x8 Card
The 5x8 Card is designed for (and with) school principals to help them observe students' use of Practice Standards that are an integral part of the Common Core State Standards Mathematics (CCSS-M). The Card was developed by a Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) team working in...
Common Core State Standards: Assessment Literacy
This website provides a wide range of information on assessments, including an overview of assessment literacy, California’s assessment system, the purposes and uses of assessments, developing assessments, analyzing data, and effective use of assessment results. It is one in a series of ...
Knowing the Score: The Who, What, and Why of Testing
This brief provides information about K–12 testing with the goal of helping parents, educators, policymakers, and others make decisions about testing policies in their community and state. Background information is provided, as well as answers to common questions about K–12 testing, including the...
Predictive Validity of MCAS and PARCC: Comparing 10th Grade MCAS Tests to PARCC Integrated Math II, Algebra II, and 10th Grade English Language Arts Tests
From the Executive Summary: "The Massachusetts Executive Office of Education commissioned this study to provide timely, rigorous evidence on the extent to which MCAS and PARCC test scores can accurately assess whether students will succeed in college (recognizing that this was not the original aim...