Top News
- Higher Education Leads Announced
- Students with Disabilities Advisory Committee
- Measured Progress selected for Item and Task Specifications Contract
Announcements
- Higher Education Leads Announced—SBAC announced the assignment of designated higher education leads from each of the member states. The higher education leads for California include Dr. Monica Lin, Associate Director, Undergraduate Admissions at University of California, Office of the President, Dr. Linda Michalowski, Vice Chancellor for Student Services and Special Programs for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, and Dr. Beverly Young, Assistant Vice Chancellor, California State University. The national higher education leads will help ensure that SBAC receives ongoing input from a variety of higher education stakeholders as SBAC develops the assessment system. A complete list of SBAC K-12 and national higher education leads is posted at SBAC Member States page (Outside Source).
- Students with Disabilities Advisory Committee—On January 24, 2012, CDE sent SBAC nominations for California experts to join the SBAC Students with Disabilities Advisory Committee. Dr. Diane L. Fazzi, Acting Associate Dean, Charter College of Education California State University/Los Angeles and Patricia Schetter, MA, Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities/UC Davis MIND Institute were nominated to represent California. The committee will assist the work groups and other SBAC efforts by providing guidance on how to develop accessible assessments for all students.
- Measured Progress selected for Item and Task Specifications Contract—SBAC selected Measured Progress as the winner of RFP-04. Measured Progress will work with the Item Development Work Group, the Performance Task Development Work Group, and the Accessibility and Accommodations Work Group to develop specifications for each item type and performance task, a style guide for all materials, bias and sensitivity guidelines, and accessibility and accommodations guidelines to support the SBAC Assessment System.
SBAC Resources
- SMARTER Balanced is on Twitter—Follow @SmarterBalanced to get resources and links to the latest SBAC news.
SBAC Questions/Answers of the Week (Taken from the SBAC All States Updates)
Q: How long will it take a student to complete the summative assessment?
A: The end-of-year summative assessment that is used for accountability purposes consists of two parts: 1) a computer adaptive portion and 2) performance tasks in reading, writing, and math. SBAC expects that the computer adaptive test event will be similar in length or shorter than current summative tests—about an hour for each content area. The exact test length will be determined by member states, educators, and technical advisors over the next year. One of the advantages of computer adaptive testing is that it is more efficient than fixed-form testing, requiring fewer questions to accurately determine each student’s achievement level.
The performance tasks are delivered by computer, but are not computer-adaptive. At this point, SBAC is designing one performance task for reading, one for writing, and two for math at each grade 3–11, including grades 9 and 10. Performance tasks provide an opportunity to challenge students to apply their knowledge and skills to respond to complex, real-world problems. They can best be described as collections of questions and tasks presented to students that are coherently connected to a single theme or scenario.
For example, a student may be presented with reading material on a given topic, and asked questions about the reading. That may be followed by reading on the same topic, but from a different perspective, with questions on that reading, plus some compare/contrast questions. Finally, the student may be provided additional readings on the same, or an associated topic, and asked to take a position or provide an argument in favor of or opposing a particular perspective, using the provided texts as reference. This example performance task could take place across more than one sitting of 45–60 minutes each.
Q: Why is SMARTER Balanced creating performance tasks for grades 9 and 10 when the summative assessment will only be administered in grade 11?
A: Included in the SBAC’s proposal to the U.S. Department of Education is a commitment to develop “up to six performance tasks by grade 11 for both ELA and mathematics.” Governing States considered the possibility that at least some of these performance tasks might need to be administered before grade 11. SBAC Governing States agreed to the provision regarding performance tasks as one means by which the CCSS might be covered, while minimizing the impact on students’ 11th-grade instructional time. Whether performance tasks will be administered in 9th and 10th grade—and the particular way in which the performance tasks roll out for grades 9 and 10—is still in development, and will require careful consideration by several of the SBAC’s work groups and the Governing States. SBAC anticipates that these issues will be resolved through the test specifications development process, which began in early 2012.
