Supporting Your Child for Success: Smarter Balanced Assessment & Beyond

1. Smarter Balanced Assessments and preparing your child for college, career, and life Clyde Hill Parent Education Program Presented by Mary Olin

2. Agenda How and why did the new Smarter Balanced Assessments come to be? How are these assessments different than other assessment that we have typically experienced? How can you best support your child as we transition to a more rigorous curriculum and for a productive life?

3. How did we get here? A sad but funny example……

4. Why was there a shift to Common Core? • Researchers and professional within higher education began to see a significant gap in the skills needed for complex thinking and analysis • There were significant gaps in reading level and reading complexity between graduating seniors and college Freshman • There was an inability for students to engage in “real life” problem solving • There was an inability to fill workforce needs requiring high levels of math, science, and analytical thinking • As a nation, we needed changes to close widening achievement gap between majority and minority populations.

5. What is Smarter Balanced? A consortium of 26 states and territories working together to build next-generation formative, interim and summative assessments for K-12 schools tied to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics

6. How is Smarter Balanced Different than other assessments? • Normed Reference vs. Criterion Reference • Adaptive and performance based vs. static multiple choice • Assessment of “depth of knowledge” vs. recall and basic comprehension • Is your child on track for college and career readiness?

7. SBA Scoring Scale Score Achievement Level Descriptors for each Claim 3000 Claim Reading 4 = thorough understanding 3 = adequate understanding 2 = partial understanding 1 = minimal understanding Claim Writing Claim Listening Claim Research 2000

8. Depth of Knowledge • DOK1: Recall of a fact, term, concept, or procedure; basic comprehension. • DOK2: Application of concepts and/or procedures involving some mental processing. • DOK3: Applications requiring abstract thinking, reasoning, and/or more complex inferences. • DOK4: Extended analysis or investigation that requires synthesis and analysis across multiple contexts and non-routine applications.

9. Depth of Knowledge

11. How Can I support my Child as we move to a more rigorous expectations? • What do the Common Core Standards, Smarter Balanced Assessments and success in live have in common? All three require a students to demonstrate the virtue of perseverance and grit

12. How do we foster perseverance within our children? • Teach, model, and value the importance of failure and risk taking Set up a wall or bulletin board for the family that showcases “Epic Fails” and Marvelous Mistakes” Try new things in front of your kids and reinforce that even grownups make mistakes. Praise children for their effort not their intelligence

13. How do we foster perseverance within our children? • See your child’s potential and help them with perspective Encourage them to embrace reasonable challenges and understand that things might be a little bumpy at first. Help you child create a vision or visualize success Create small victories and show them their progress

14. The Power of “yet”….. Carol Dweck

15. The “kids” version of the power of yet…

16. Google these researchers and writers for more information on teaching your child to be more resilient and how to reinforce perseverance: Dr. Carol Dweck – Know for growth mindset work Paul Tough – Author of How Children Succeed Adina Soclof – parentingsimpley.com – articles on teaching resiliency Parent Toolkit Blog by Sean Slade and Tom Hoerr Key words: perseverance, resiliency, grit