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Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) released its Usability, Accessibility, and Accommodations Guidelines last week. In this week’s post, I’ll walk you through the Guidelines’ contents and open up a couple of areas for discussion around how the Guidelines might impact you in the classroom.
This blog post written by guest blogger Ayanna Cooper features four recommended steps for administrators to strengthen their English language programs in the greater context of more rigorous academic standards.
Since teachers will need to plan their CCSS-based instruction around the CCSS standards as well as the CCSS-based assessments, I thought it would be helpful in part 1 of this post to dissect a sample test task from an ELL point of view in order to take a closer look at what the item might mean for ELLs and those who teach them.
Big news at the end of the last week: On Friday, Education Week’s Michele McNeil reported that a months-long standoff between the state of California and the U.S. Department of Education has ended, with federal officials approving a waiver allowing the state to administer the Smarter Balanced field tests this year instead of its state testing program.
This blog post focuses on ELL considerations that are important for schools and districts to address in planning their assessments, including accommodations on CCSS content assessments and aspects of computer-based assessment might prove to be especially challenging for ELLs. It also recommends some resources to support ELLs’ success in computer-based testing.
in this week’s post, I’ll suggest some instructional strategies that teachers of ELLs can use to prepare their students for this type of task that their ELLs will encounter on the PARCC exam in English language arts/Literacy.
Lesli Maxwell at Education Week reports that the state of New York is preparing to ask for federal waivers to administer Common Core State Standards language arts assessments in ELLs' native languages.
Education Week's Lesli Maxwell reports that the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) will translate Common Core math assessments into Spanish and possibly other languages.
Lesli Maxwell at Education Week reports that the final version of the accommodations manual has just been released, and she also includes information about PARCC’s debate around testing supports for special populations in her coverage.
