What Supports Do Teachers Need to Help Students Meet Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy? Findings from the American Teacher and American School Leader Panels
This report provides educators' perspectives on their readiness and needs regarding helping students meet new state standards. Findings are drawn from surveys of the American Teacher and School Leader panels, which represent samples of K–12 teachers and school leaders across the nation. The survey...
Better Tests, Fewer Barriers: Advances in Accessibility through PARCC and Smarter Balanced
As the title implies, this Center for American Progress publication provides an overview of the general movement toward increased accessibility for students with disabilities (SWDs) and English Language Learners (ELLs). The authors present statistics showing a substantial increase in the numbers of...
Teaching Higher: Educators' Perspectives on Common Core Implementation
This study by the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University surveyed a representative sample of teachers in five states (Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Nevada) as they prepared their students to take the new Common Core-aligned assessments in the spring...
Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments
This study's purpose was to evaluate the quality of four standardized assessments—three new, multi-state assessments (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and a well-regarded existing state assessment (Massachusetts' state exam [MCAS])—to determine whether they met new criteria developed by the...
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...