Digital Café LACOE

2. Digital Café LACOE August 6th 2013 Kristin O’Connor, Assistant Manager of Professional Services, Vantage Learning 267-756-1135 koconnor@vantage.com

3. Table Talk: The SBAC pilot: • For those teachers who participated in the pilot, review the process: • How did it go? • What was the reaction of your students? • What worked well? What were the challenges? • For those who did not participate: • What have you heard? • Has feedback been positive or negative?

4. How is the SBAC Organized? • CAT-Computer Adaptive Testing • Various Item Types • Smarter Balanced will require your students to digitally interact with manipulatives, data, and visual examples to create high-level cognitive responses.

5. How to prepare your students for CAT? • What is CAT? • Computer-Adaptive Testing is derived from a massive bank of digital questions and prompts. The student takes the exam on a computer or electronic device, and his or her test path is determined by the success rate. If the student is doing well, the digital test uses an algorithm to adjust the difficulty and provide subsequent harder questions. If he or she is struggling, the test will once again adjust and pull less-difficult questions from its bank until the student begins to answer questions correctly. Then the student will return to grade appropriate questions.

6. How to prepare your students for CAT • Activity: Jig Saw, ED Week, Adaptive Testing Evolves to Asses Common Core Skills, Michelle Davis. October 15, 2012. • For this activity you will work with your group to read a section of the article. • For the section you read, write down three things you learned plus one remaining question.

7. How to prepare your students for CAT • What are the benefits? • The knock on traditional pencil-and-paper tests is that they are typically geared to assess the mean or middle student, leaving out the peripheral students requiring remediation or acceleration. CAT’s adaptive ability remedies this problem by challenging each and every student while eliminating the disengagement brought on by overly-difficult or trivial questions/prompts • Faster administration, processing and delivery of test results to teachers and school staff • Readily available data for deeper analysis • Enhanced interactivity and items which are composed of multimedia objects, allowing for the measurement of skills not easily measurable by traditional tests • More flexible assessment delivery which offers more opportunities for “assessment on demand” • What are the challenges? • Will schools be technologically ready for assessments that are computer based? • Student motivation • Teacher preparation • Ultimately, how can we prepare our students for this type of testing? PRACTICE!

8. What are the goals of the Smarter Balanced Assessments? • Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) will promote high-quality teaching and learning assessment items needed to elicit behaviors that students exhibit when they engage in high quality instruction.

9. What Are the Instructional Claims of SBAC? ELA: • Reading:“Students can read closely and critically to comprehend a range of increasingly complex literary and informational texts.” • Writing: Students can produce effective writing for a range of writing purposes and audiences.” • Speaking and Listening:“Students can employ effective speaking and listening skills for a range of purposes and audiences.” • Research/Inquiry:“Students can engage appropriately in collaborative and independent inquiry to investigate/research topics, pose questions, and gather and present information.” Math: • Concepts & Procedures: “Students can explain and apply mathematical concepts and interpret and carry out mathematical procedures with precision and fluency.” • Problem Solving: “Students can solve a range of complex well-posed problems in pure and applied mathematics, making productive use of knowledge and problem solving strategies.” • Communicating Reasoning: “Students can clearly and precisely construct viable arguments to support their own reasoning and to critique the reasoning of others.” • Modeling and Data Analysis: “Students can analyze complex, real-world scenarios and can construct and use mathematical models to interpret and solve problems.”

10. What types of items Will Be on the Assessment? • Traditional Multiple Choice: (Selected Response) • Selected Response Items (SR) contain a series of options from which to choose correct responses.

11. Constructed Response and Extended Response Items • Constructed Response (CR) is a general term for items requiring the student to generate a response as opposed to selecting a response. • Both short and extended constructed response items will be used. Short constructed response items may require test-takers to enter a single word, phrase, sentence, number, or set of numbers, whereas extended constructed response items will require more elaborated answers and explanations of reasoning. • These kinds of constructed response items allow students to demonstrate their use of complex thinking skills such as formulating comparisons or contrasts; proposing cause and effects; identifying patterns or conflicting points of view; categorizing, summarizing, or interpreting information; and developing generalizations, explanations, justifications, or evidence-based conclusions (Darling Hammond & Pecheone, 2010).

12. Technology- Enhanced Items • Technology-Enhanced Items employ technology to: • Elicit a response from the student (e.g., selecting one or more points on a graphic, dragging and dropping a graphic from one location to another, manipulating a graph) • TE Items employ technology to assess content, cognitive complexity, and Depth of Knowledge not assessable otherwise. • The ultimate goal of TE items is to provide better measurement of student knowledge and skills through technology

13. Performance Tasks • Performance Tasks will provide a measure of the student’s ability to integrate knowledge and skills across multiple [content] standards —a key component of college- and career readiness. • Performance Tasks clearly align with the goals of 21st Century Learning Skills and Common Core Standards.

14. Performance Tasks • The Smarter Balanced Performance Task Work Group has identified the essential characteristics by specifying that a performance task must: • Integrate knowledge and skills across multiple content standards or English language arts strands/mathematics domains; • Measure capacities such as depth of understanding, research skills, and/or complex analysis with relevant evidence; • Require student-initiated planning, management of information and ideas, and/or interaction with other materials; • Require production of more extended responses (e.g., oral presentations, exhibitions, product development), in addition to more extended written responses that might be revised and edited; • Reflect a real-world task and/or scenario-based problem; • Lend itself to multiple approaches; • Represent content that is relevant and meaningful to students; • Allow for demonstration of important knowledge and skills, including those that address 21st Century Skills such as critically analyzing and, synthesizing media texts; • Focus on big ideas over facts; • Allow for multiple points of view and interpretations; • Require scoring that focuses on the essence of the task; • Reflect one or more of the Standards for Mathematical Practice, Reading and Writing (or Speaking and Listening) processes • Seem feasible for the school/classroom environment

15. Putting it all together: • Carousel Activity: SBAC Item Review: For this activity, you will be given various SBAC items to review. (Refer to your item review handout for help.) • What type of item (Short Response, Constructed Response, Technology Enhanced)are you reviewing? • What grade level do you think this item is appropriate for? • What SBAC Instructional Claim is being measured? • What skills are being measured? • How do these items compare to traditional assessment questions?

16. Putting it all together:ELA • 43016 Writing – Kudzu Grade: 11Claim 2: Students can produce effective and well-grounded writing for a range of purposes and audiences.Target 3. WRITE/REVISE BRIEF TEXTS: Apply a variety of strategies when writing or revising one or more paragraphs of informational/explanatory text: organizing ideas by stating and maintaining a focus/tone, providing appropriate transitional strategies for coherence, developing a complex topic/subtopics including relevant supporting evidence/vocabulary and elaboration, or providing a conclusion appropriate to purpose and audience.CCSS: W-2a, W-2b, W-2c, W-2d, W-2e, and/or W-2f In this item, students are asked to revise a text to improve coherence. 43000 Grandma Ruth 2 Grade: 4Claim 1: Students can read closely and analytically to comprehend a range of increasingly complex literary and informational texts.Target 3. WORD MEANINGS: Determine intended meanings of words, including words with multiple meanings (academic/tier 2 words), based on context, word relationships (e.g., synonyms), word structure (e.g., common Greek or Latin roots, affixes), or use of resources (e.g., dictionary, thesaurus).CCSS: RL-4; L-4, L-5cThis item focuses on the ability to recognize the relationship between word meaning and context

17. ELA Continued • 43009 Writing – Oliver Grade: 4Claim 2: Students can produce effective and well-grounded writing for a range of purposes and audiences.Target 1. WRITE/REVISE BRIEF TEXTS: Write or revise one or more paragraphs demonstrating specific narrative strategies (use of dialogue, sensory or concrete details, description), chronology, appropriate transitional strategies for coherence, or authors’ craft appropriate to purpose (closure, detailing characters, plot, setting, or an event).CCSS: W-3a, W-3b, W-3c, W-3d, and/or W-3eThis item assesses students' ability to add revisions to a text that are coherent and logical. • Writing - Cell Phones Grade: 6Claim 2: Students can produce effective and well-grounded writing for a range of purposes and audiences.Target 6. WRITE/REVISE BRIEF TEXTS: Apply a variety of strategies when writing or revising one or more paragraphs of text that express arguments about topics or sources: establishing and supporting a claim, organizing and citing supporting evidence using credible sources, providing appropriate transitional strategies for coherence, appropriate vocabulary, or providing a conclusion appropriate to purpose and audience.CCSS: W-1a, W-1b, W-1c, W-1d, and/or W-1e This item asks students to use the information provided to write a brief text stating and supporting a position.

18. SBAC Items: Math • 43328 Fractions 2a Grade: 4Claim 2: Problem SolvingTarget: 2ACCSS: 4.NF.4cThis item maintains focus on fractions as numbers, asking students to determine in the context of a problem whether there is a whole number that can be multiplied by a given fraction so that the product is between two consecutive whole numbers. • 43081 The Contest Grade: 4Claim 3: Communicating ReasoningTarget: 3B, 2DCCSS: 3.OA.2, 4.OA.3, 4.OA.4This item taps student understanding of factoring, divisibility, and interpreting a remainder. Although the primary alignment is to grade 4, this item may also be available to students in adjacent grades.

19. Math: Continued • 43056 Expressions and Equations 3 Grade: 8Claim 1: Concepts and ProceduresTarget: 1DCCSS: 8.EE.7aIn grade 6 students generate equivalent algebraic expressions, in grade 7 these are expanded to include expressions with rational coefficients, and in grade 8 students use earlier strategies to solve increasingly complex equations. • 42960 Integer Expressions Grade: 7Claim 1: Concepts and ProceduresTarget: 1BCCSS: 7.NS.1Students use the number line to add and subtract integers.

20. How do you prepare students for the various item types? • What skills are being measured on the Smarter Balanced Assessment ? : • Critical Thinking • Problem Solving • Creative Thinking • Collaborating • Communicating

21. How do you prepare students for the various item types? • Table Talk: Learning Strategies • Working with your group, discuss learning strategies you have used in the past or might use in the future to meet the goals SBAC.

22. SBAC/ 21st Century Learning Skills • Working successfully in a team • Use of technology in learning • Project-based learning activities • Problem-based learning activities • Mock real-life situations and experiences • Writing about learning' prompts • Building and creating models • Inquiry-based learning activities

23. In what way does SBAC change the way we teach our students? • What “traditional skills should teachers have to prepare students for SBAC? • What new skills should teachers employ to prepare students for SBAC? • What potential challenges might occur? • What types of PD should be offered to teachers?