Education Week - November 11, 2015 - S9

EDUCATION WEEK

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November 11, 2015

Understanding Formative Assessment > www.edweek.org/go/formativeassessment-digital

a price for nonconsortium states
that want to use its online resources
in 2016-17, but Smarter Balanced
officials said they have no plans to
extend access to nonmembers.
For this academic year, PARCC's
11 members get both the summative
tests and the instructional resources,
including formative-assessment activities, for one price. Smarter Balanced uses a tiered-price structure.
Two of its 18 members paid for the
summative assessments only in
2014-15. The other 16 are paying
$3.35 more per student to get the online instructional resources as well.

Building Suite of Resources
The Smarter Balanced digital
library is stocked with more than
2,600 resources and is still growing.
Instructional videos, lesson and unit
plans, and other tools have been submitted by teachers who have found
them useful in their own practice
or they are resources that teachers have created themselves. The
collection has been curated by the
consortium's content experts. About
5 percent of the resources were commissioned by outside organizations,
such as Amplify, which built interactive modules for the digital library,
and Arizona State University, which
designed modules for teachers who
work with students who have disabilities.
When educators sign in to the
Smarter Balanced portal, they see
a thumbnail display of some highlighted resources, each with a brief
summary. Some have green checkmarks, connoting high user ratings.
Teachers can search the library by
grade level, subject, the standards
they'd like to cover, or by the highest-rated or most-viewed tools. Like
shoppers who post product reviews
on Amazon, teachers can read their
colleagues' reviews of the videos and
lesson plans and post their own.
Some resources have a broad focus,
such as a module that details strategies for teaching speaking and listening skills, or one that helps teachers understand how to use various
types of assessments. Others zero
in on "smaller grained stuff," such
as guidelines for grading 3rd grade
narrative writing, said Chrys V. Mursky, Smarter Balanced's director of
instructional supports.
One animated instructional module shows an 8th grade math teacher
leading a discussion about the Pythagorean theorem. She sees from
her students' work that they don't
fully grasp how irrational numbers
can be used to express the lengths of
triangles' sides. The segment follows

her as she pinpoints this misunderstanding and facilitates a discussion
among the students to help bring
light to the idea.
The 10-minute module was designed to show how a teacher can
identify and act on evidence of students' learning, a key principle of
formative assessment.
Teachers also have access to online discussion forums, where they
can share their experiences with the
resources. There are also two kinds
of interim tests they can use: one
that's meant to mirror the year-end
summative test, and shorter "block"
interims that focus on specific ideas
or clusters of standards.
The formative resources aren't
intended for use as summative-test
preparation, Mursky said. They're
meant to help educators "generate
questions" about students and where
they are in their learning.
"A lot of people think of formative
assessment as a thing, an event,"
she said. "They use the term 'formative' because it's associated with the
classroom, as opposed to an end-ofyear, large-scale test. We work really hard to make sure people understand that that's not what we're
talking about. We're talking about
the instructional process."

ture instruction, and the feedback I
can give students and parents to help
students progress in their next steps."
Another tool in the PARCC library will be a bank of released test
questions. Teachers can assemble
those into interim tests or use them
formatively in classroom work, said
Doug Sovde, the consortium's math
director.
PARCC's online resources are
curated by content experts from
PARCC states. Many were crafted
by companies or organizations with
the help of teachers. Pearson, for
instance, designed the diagnostic assessments for grades 2-8, while the
Council for Aid to Education created
the speaking and listening tools,
Sovde said.
The consortium originally
planned to produce 12th grade
"bridge courses" to help 11th graders bolster skills before their senior
year, as well as model instructional

units. But a tight timeline and budget made that impossible, Sovde
said. The consortium will crowdsource those tools instead, he said.

Midcourse Adjustments
How widely the PARCC and
Smarter Balanced instructional
resources will be used is an open
question. Several educators said
that rising antipathy toward testing
could influence how teachers see the
consortia's teaching tools.
"My teachers don't view state
tests as a positive instructional experience, so I'm not sure that any
formative tools associated with
them would be their first choice innately," said Eric Conti, the superintendent of schools in Burlington,
Mass., which, like other districts
in the Bay State, had the choice of
administering either PARCC or the
state's previous test, the Massachu-

setts Comprehensive Assessment
System, or MCAS.
Conti is spreading the word
among his teachers about PARCC's
instructional resources and says
they'll be the judge of their quality and utility. But he said that his
staff has "already invested decades
of effort" to build their own formative resources linked to the district's
curriculum, so he doesn't foresee a
huge uptake on PARCC's offerings.
Stephanie Cotterill, a West
Virginia English/language arts
teacher who helped develop tools for
Smarter Balanced, said she recommends them to colleagues at Wildwood Middle School in Shenandoah
Junction.
"I know the rigor that goes into
those materials before they get
in there," she said. "They [her colleagues] don't accept things that
aren't well thought out and developed." ■

PARCC's Portal
PARCC members will be able to
access its online resources through
a portal called the Partnership Resource Center. In the center, teachers
will be able to use a bank of released
test questions to build interim assessments. They'll also have access to
diagnostic assessments for students
in grades 2-8, formative tasks for
K-2 students, and modules designed
to help them teach speaking and listening skills in grades K-12.
One formative-assessment module guides kindergarten teachers
through a read-aloud exercise. It
supplies the storybook, Mouse Count,
and offers examples of the kinds of
questions teachers can ask to probe
pupils' comprehension and foundational skills in the counting fable
about mice who escape a wily snake.
The module includes ideas for writing exercises, and samples of student
work, annotated to help teachers
evaluate their students' progress.
The accompanying checklists and
rubrics are "focused on descriptive
feedback, rather than on grading,"
said Bonnie Hain, PARCC's director
of English/language arts. "The focus
isn't on how can I give this student
a grade. It's on capturing where the
student is in their learning toward a
particular standard, and shaping fu-

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Education Week - November 11, 2015

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