Smarter Balance Practice Test:

The topic to begin every staff meeting is how are we preparing the students for the Smart Balance Assessment that correlates to the Common Core State Standards. Even to day in the department meeting our department chair was talking with us about the use of Depth of Knowledge (DoK) questions so students are accustomed to high level level questions. This evening I spent a good majority of time dissecting the practice test found at the Smarter Balance website.. This is was a good experience for me in preparation for my project in m641. In order for me to create a outstanding lesson plan I need to create an outstanding summative assessment. My goal to create a similar assessment to the one provided by the smarter balance assessment for the students at the end of their Geometry Unit that will have the Common Core State Standards as their foundation.

As I continued to take the assessment at Smarter Balance I was amazed by the number of different learning targets I was using to solve a particular problem. I was often thinking the question was written to trick the students. After continued reflection I came to the realization the assessment wanted to assess the students on a wide variety of learning objects for a single question. This is going to be a major hurtle for the way I have been teaching and for the way I was taught. So often growing up for me and seeing the released items from older MEAP assessment the questions where basic problems (i.e. add these fractions). Now they ask the students to perform a number of operations with fractions then identify if it is larger or smaller than a given value or it doesn't' ask the student to find the mean from a set of values it asks the students, "how much did the mean number of push ups increase in these two line plots from gym class."

Creating questions of this nature are going to take some time, I believe creating one unit a year would be a good goal. For this year and this class, I am going to use a majority of my last few weeks of m641 to prepare a summative assessment based on the smarter balance questions.