Smarter Balanced reveals accommodations guidelines

by Derek Spencer

The Smarter Balanced testing consortium, which is working on standardized tests based on the Common Core State Standards, has released its guidelines on accessibility accommodations.

The consortium will not allow students in grades 3 through 5 to have passages read to them while they are taking their exams.

Education Week writes about the issue here.

Smarter Balanced will restrict these students from using the read-aloud accomodation because the consortium's analysis of the Common Core State Standards indicates that students in grades 3 – 5 are being tested on their text-decoding skills. States may elect to use the read-aloud accommodations anyway, but the test results for those students will be deemed invalid.

Interestingly, older students will be afforded read-aloud accommodations, as Smarter Balanced believes these students are being tested on reading skills other than text-decoding. 

You can read Smarter Balanced's Accommodations Guidelines here. There are some particularly interesting comments on test design at the end of the document.

Derek Spencer is a Marketing Communications Associate at Prestwick House.

PARCC releases Performance Level Descriptors for ELA/Literacy

by Derek Spencer

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) recently released its "Performance Level Descriptors" for ELA/Literacy in grades 3 – 11. Here are the descriptors for grades 9 – 11:

PARCC ELA/Literacy Performance Level Descriptors

This set of descriptors explains the criteria PARCC will use to score students. It appears that students will be assigned a "performance level" between 2 and 5, with 5 being the highest rating.

PARCC is a consortium of 22 states (plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands) working on new assessments that will adhere to Common Core State Standards requirements. These assessments will be delivered via computer but, unlike the assessments delivered by the Smarter Balanced consortium, will not be computer adaptive.

Tests that are computer adaptive deliver different questions to a student based on that student's response to the previous question. If a student answers a question correctly, the next question will be more difficult (and vice-versa). PARCC's computerized assessments will be more traditional; all students will take the same test.

What do you think about computerized testing? Do you think computerized adaptive testing can work in an ELA setting?

Derek Spencer is a Marketing Communications Associate at Prestwick House.