You’ve spent a few years preparing yourself and your educational practice for the arrival of the new Common Core standards. Perhaps you’ve even begun to integrate some of the differences in the standards into your lessons, adopting more rigor and critical thinking tasks instead of “drill and kill”.
The good news is that those steps are half the battle toward success on the new assessments that go along with the Common Core. But if you think teaching to the test will add up to Common Core success, you’re mistaken.
What will they look like?
By now you’re probably familiar with Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced, the two consortia the Common Core states have aligned with to develop the next-generation assessments. Both promise state-of-the-art, computerized tests that fully assess both the skills and the spirit of the new standards.
Those computer skills are the first step to preparing your students for the new tests. It’s hard to imagine a child not being technologically savvy these days, but plenty may not be efficient enough at typing or other skills needed to write effectively on the computer. Make sure they are also familiar with manipulating virtual objects, as the assessments feature interactive, skills-based items.
Reading and writing on the assessments
The technology provides the consortia to assess in the true spirit of the Common Core, meaning multiple-choice items will be rare. For example, the new standards want students to be able to effectively read complicated text, both fiction and non-fiction, and be able to refer back to that text when composing a response. On the assessments, they may even be asked to highlight key passages in the text. They will certainly be asked to write more, even on the math assessments as a way to justify their answer.
The best preparation for that part of the testing is to simply have the students read deeper, more challenging text, from multiple sources, and then be asked to react through writing. Math teachers need to ask the students to write more as well.
Math on the assessments
Speaking of math, the Common Core is all about using computational skills in the real world. Endless lines of multiplication questions will give way to assessment items that will require students to solve real-world problems, without telling the students which skills they will need to do so. Number sense and situational math become paramount.
Again, the best way to prepare is to practice. Ask the kids to perform math based on realistic problems. For every math concept, a real-world application. And gradually increase the complexity of your practice problems until they are no longer fazed by complicated, multi-step word problems and situations.
One more important point about the assessments themselves: both PARCC and Smarter Balanced have made sample assessments available on their websites. They are definitely worth a look.
The Next Level
Have you seen the samples yet? What were your impressions? Educate us in the comments below.
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And if you feel your child needs a little more help preparing for this rigorous new curriculum, please find out more about Athena’s services and how they can help you using this link.