A Strong Foundation: The Common Core State Standards

1. A Strong Foundation: The Common Core State Standards • Nearly every state in the nation is working individually and collectively to improve its academic standards and assessments to ensure students graduate with the knowledge and skills most demanded by college and careers • The Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics were created by educators around the nation

2. *Minnesota adopted the CCSS in ELA/literacy only 46 States + DC Have Adopted the Common Core State Standards

3. Key Advances of the Common Core ANCHORED IN COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS

4. What’s Next?Common Assessments • Common Core State Standards are critical, but it is just the first step • Common assessments aligned to the Common Core will help ensure the new standards truly reach every classroom

5. Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)

6. PARCC AssessmentsELA/Literacy and Mathematics, Grades 3–11 Beginning of School Year End of School Year Flexible administration Performance-Based Assessment DiagnosticAssessment Mid-Year Assessment End-of-Year Assessment Speaking and Listening Assessment Key: Optional Required

7. Higher Expectations

8. Goal #1: Create High Quality Assessments • Summative Assessment Components: • Performance-Based Assessment (PBA) administered as close to the end of the school year as possible. The ELA/literacy PBA will focus on writing effectively when analyzing text. The mathematics PBA will focus on applying skills, concepts, and understandings to solve multi-step problems requiring abstract reasoning, precision, perseverance, and strategic use of tools • End-of-Year Assessment (EOY) administered after approx. 90% of the school year. The ELA/literacy EOY will focus on reading comprehension. The math EOY will be comprised of innovative, machine-scorable items • Non-Summative Assessment Components: • Diagnostic Assessment designed to be an indicator of student knowledge and skills so that instruction, supports and professional development can be tailored to meet student needs • Mid-Year Assessment comprised of performance-based items and tasks, with an emphasis on hard-to-measure standards. After study, individual states may consider including as a summative component

9. Goal #2: Build a Pathway to College and Career Readiness for All Students K-2 formative assessment being developed, aligned to the PARCC system Timely student achievement data showing students, parents and educators whether ALL students are on-track to college and career readiness College readiness score to identify who is ready for college-level coursework • Targeted interventions & supports: • 12th-grade bridge courses • PD for educators SUCCESS IN FIRST-YEAR, CREDIT-BEARING, POSTSECONDARY COURSEWORK ONGOING STUDENT SUPPORTS/INTERVENTIONS

10. Goal #3: Support Educators in the Classroom INSTRUCTIONAL TOOLS TO SUPPORT IMPLEMENTATION PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT MODULES K-12 Educator TIMELY STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT DATA EDUCATOR-LED TRAINING TO SUPPORT “PEER-TO-PEER” TRAINING

11. Goal #4: Develop 21st Century, Technology-Based Assessments PARCC’s assessment will be computer-based and leverage technology in a range of ways: • Item Development • Develop innovative tasks that engage students in the assessment process • Administration • Reduce paperwork, increase security, reduce shipping/receiving & storage • Increase access to and provision of accommodations for SWDs and ELLs • Scoring • Make scoring more efficient by combining human and automated approaches • Reporting • Produce timely reports of students performance throughout the year to inform instructional, interventions, and professional development

12. Goal #5: Advance Accountability at All Levels • PARCC assessments will be purposefully designed to generate valid, reliable and timely data, including measures of growth,for various accountability uses including: • School and district effectiveness • Educator effectiveness • Student placement into college-credit bearing courses • Comparisons with other state and international benchmarks • PARCC assessments will be designed for other accountability uses as states deem appropriate

13. Looking Ahead

14. Advances in the PARCC ELA/Literacy Summative Assessment August 2013

15. PARCC’s Fundamental Advance PARCC is designed to reward quality instruction aligned to the Common Core State Standards, so the assessment is worthy of preparation rather than a distraction from good work.

16. PARCC’s Core Commitments to ELA/Literacy Assessment Quality • Questions Worth Answering: Sequences of questions that draw students into deeper encounters with texts are the norm (as in an excellent classroom), rather than sets of random questions of varying quality. • Texts Worth Reading: The assessments use authentic texts worthy of study instead of artificially produced or commissioned passages.  • Better Standards Demand Better Questions: Instead of reusing existing items, PARCC is developing custom items to the Standards. • Fidelity to the Standards: PARCC evidence statements are rooted in the language of the Standards so that expectations remain the same in both instructional and assessment settings.

17. What Are the Shifts at the Heart of PARCC’s Design (and the Standards)? • Complexity: Regular practice with complex text and its academic language. • Evidence: Reading and writing grounded in evidencefrom text, literary and informational. • Knowledge: Building knowledge through content rich nonfiction.

18. Nine Specific Advances in the PARCC ELA/Literacy Summative Assessment Demanded by the Three Common Core Shifts. . .

19. Shift 1: Regular practice with complex text and its academic language • PARCC builds a staircase of text complexity to ensure students are on track each year for college and career reading. • PARCC rewards careful, close reading rather than racing through passages. • PARCC systematically focuses on the words that matter most—not obscure vocabulary, but the academic language that pervades complex texts.

20. Shift 2: Reading and writing grounded in evidencefrom text, literary and informational • PARCC focuses on students rigorously citing evidence from texts throughout the assessment. • PARCC includes questions with more than one right answer to allow students to generate a range of rich insights that are substantiated by evidence from text(s). • PARCC requires writing to sources rather than writing to de-contextualized expository prompts. • PARCC also includes rigorous expectations for narrative writing, including accuracy and precision in writing in later grades.

21. Shift 3: Building knowledge through content rich nonfiction • PARCC assesses not just ELA but a full range of reading and writing across the disciplines. • PARCC simulates research on the assessment, including the comparison and synthesis of ideas across a range of informational sources.

22. Advances in the PARCCMathematics Summative Assessment August 2013

23. What Are the Shifts at the Heart of PARCC’s Design? • Focus: The PARCC assessment will focus strongly where the Standards focus. • Coherence: Think across grades and link to major topics within grades. • Rigor: In major topics, pursue conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application.

24. Advances in Assessment Demanded by the Shifts Shift #1 – Focus: The PARCC assessments will focus strongly where the Standards focus Advance: 70% or more on the major work in grades 3-8. • Focus allows for a variety of problem types to get at concept in multiple ways. • Students will have more time to master concepts at a deeper level.

25. Advances in Assessment Demanded by the Shifts Shift #2 - Coherence: Think across grades, and link to major topics within grades Advance: The assessment design is informed by multi-grade progressions in the Standards and the Model Content Frameworks. • Key beginnings are stressed (e.g., ratio concepts in grade 6), as are key endpoints and takeaway skills (e.g., fluency with the multiplication table in grade 3).

26. Advances in Assessment Demanded by the Shifts Shift #2 - Coherence: Think across grades, and link to major topics within grades Advance: Integrative tasks draw on multiple standards to ensure students are making important connections. • The Standards are not treated as a checklist.

27. Advances in assessment demanded by the shifts Shift #3 - Rigor: In major topics, pursue conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application Advance: PARCC assessments will reach the rigor in the Standards through innovations in technology and item design.

28. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers Website: www.PARCConline.org Sample Items: http://www.parcconline.org/samples/item-task-prototypes Twitter: @PARCCPlace