This spring, many students in the White Salmon Valley School District will take a new standardized test meant to align with the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards.
That test is called the Smarter Balanced Assessment and students in third through eighth, as well as 11th grades will be taking it right after spring break in 2015, which runs from March 30 to April 3.
The Common Core is a set of educational standards launched in 2009 meant to align the education systems across the country. Forty-three states have adopted the Common Core State Standards.
Jerry Miller, curriculum and instructional facilitator for the White Salmon Valley School District, said the tests students take now, including the Measures of Student Progress (MSP) and High School Proficiency Exam (HSPE) will be phased out over time when it comes to high school students.
“It’s not a drop dead date where we transfer over because our high school students have been under certain graduation requirements and each year those have been a little different,” Miller said. “It’s a change because we were testing in 10th grade, but Smarter Balanced tests them in 11th instead. That’s one of the reasons why we’ll still be having kids taking the HSPE instead of Smarter Balanced.”
According to the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, high school students will still have to take End of Course (EOC) exams in math classes until 2019 when the Smarter Balanced math test will be used in conjunction with the Smarter Balanced English-Language Arts test which will be phased in completely by 2017.
Currently, the timeline for high school students lists a biology EOC exam required through 2019 and beyond, but according to Miller the Washington State Board of Education asked the Legislature to drop the biology EOC requirement.
The differences between Smarter Balanced, MSP, and HSPE span the academic content of the test, how it is taken, and how the data pertaining to the results will be used.
For example, students will take the Smarter Balanced tests online, so no more paper booklets with answer bubbles to fill in with a No. 2 pencil. As a result, the test is also adaptive, in that questions will become harder if a student continues to answer correctly and easier when questions are missed.
“The assessment will really tease out the student’s knowledge as opposed to the former assessment, which just told you ‘yes, they met this’ or ‘no they did not,’” Miller said.
As far as the content goes, Miller said the math test at the high school level will be “significantly more rigorous than before,” adding that when high school students were given a practice Smarter Balanced test across the country last year, only 33 percent met the standards pertaining to math. White Salmon schools did not participate in that practice test, according to Miller.
“That wasn’t a surprise. The Common Core folks said all along that this is a far more rigorous set of expectations,” Miller said.
Parents who wish to explore Smarter Balanced and even take a practice test can go to www.smarterbalanced.org/practice-test. From there, scroll to and select “Take the Practice and Training Tests,” then click on the green “Student Interface” tab to the lower left of the screen. Parents should then just click “Sign-In” when prompted and select the grade level assessment they want to take before selecting the specific test.
After clicking “select” to take the test with default settings when prompted, hit “Start My Test” at the bottom of the screen to continue to the assessment.
Given the changes Smarter Balanced presents, Miller said parents have been interested in the test, prompting the school system to offer a forum for parents where they can take a test and ask questions on Jan. 21 from 6 pm to 8 pm at Columbia High School.
The method in which questions are presented to students will differ with Smarter Balanced, as well. Most questions will require students to utilize strategic thinking, which is Level Three of four levels when it comes to the Depth of Knowledge standards, or achievement level descriptions, used by Common Core.
For example, if an eighth grade student is asked about the Gettysburg Address, questions on the Smarter Balanced test will likely ask the student to analyze Abraham Lincoln’s line of reasoning and the evidence used to advance his point of view, rather than focusing on simpler facts to recall, like which date Lincoln was referring to when he said “four score and seven years ago.”
“We see a shift in Language Arts from ‘what does the story say’ to ‘how did the author make his point’ so you’re analyzing text a lot more carefully,” Miller said.
The four levels of achievement descriptors will be used to determine a student’s depth of knowledge in conjunction with a “scale score” that will range from 2,000 to 3,000. Washington State has also adopted the use of the student growth percentile, which will take every student ranked as a Level One, Two, Three, and Four from across the state and rank them based on test scores from year to year.
“I’m excited about that because it tells every parent whether there has been value added to their child’s education that year. I also think this will be good for both low-performing and very high-performing kids,” Miller said. “The low-performing kids always feel defeated because they’re at Level One, but this will show them that even at Level One they’ve made a tremendous amount of growth. Level Four scoring kids often feel like there’s nowhere to go, but this student growth percentile measures their performance against other very high performing kids.”
Smarter Balanced represents a change for teachers and administrators, as well. Miller said last year he put together a series of professional development activities called “the Common Core Academy” that allowed teachers to spend time developing lesson plans based on practice tests.
This year, the administration team took the Smarter Balanced Assessment and then followed up with teachers at each of their respective buildings to come up with a calendar for when the teachers would take it and when students could practice throughout the year.
In January, students will also be able to access interim assessments online.
“Basically they are practice tests that are just like the real thing and students and teachers will be able to get scores back on them. It’s a mid-year assessment to see if you’re on track and next year there will be three available,” Miller said.
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