Smarter Balanced Celebrates Successful Practice Run
This coming school year, a majority of states will implement the Common Core State Standards and corresponding assessments from either the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. To prepare for the new assessments, both consortia field-tested thousands of test items this spring. AACTE asked each consortium to provide our members with an update on its progress. This post addresses Smarter Balanced; find the PARCC update here. The views in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
As K-12 schools across the country work on implementing the Common Core State Standards, a major body of work has been preparation of new assessments built to assess student mastery of the standards. In June, the 22-state Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium marked a significant milestone as its field test came to a close. The scale and scope of this “practice run” of new assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards was truly unprecedented; 4.2 million students participated, making this field test the largest online assessment in the nation’s history.