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Smarter Balanced interim assessments
delayed for most students
Mar 24, 2015 | By Laurie Udesky | No Comments
As millions of California students prepare to take
the new Smarter Balanced assessments this spring,
most will not have had the benefit of taking a series
of “interim assessments” that were supposed to help
them and their teachers prepare for the new tests
aligned with the Common Core State Standards.
The interim assessments were supposed to give
students a way to rehearse for the Smarter Balanced
assessments and allow teachers to see how well
students had mastered the math and English
Language Arts curriculum tied to the Common
Core.
Third grader taking a test at Bayshore Elementary School in
Daly City
That’s not how it has worked out, however. The interim assessments were supposed to be in the
hands of educators last fall. But the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium didn’t complete
them until the end of January, too late for most teachers or districts to use them extensively,
according to interviews conducted by EdSource.
Luci Willits, deputy executive director of the Smarter Balanced consortium, told EdSource
earlier this year that the release was delayed because teachers had not finished vetting test
questions until late October. It was further delayed by test designers who had to field questions
from states about scoring the essay portions of the assessments.
“Ideally, it would have been best to have the interim items available in the fall, but circumstances
prohibited the rollout earlier,” Willits said.
As a result, superintendents of six school districts EdSource is tracking as they implement the
Common Core said that, for the most part, the interim assessments have been of limited use.
Districts that were counting on giving their students the optional midterm assessments either
abandoned those plans or scaled them back significantly.
“I’m dying to know how our kids are going to do,” said Elise Darwish, chief academic officer for
Aspire Public Schools. “But it is too much to ask for kids to spend seven hours in March on a
practice test when they’re going to take the actual test in two months anyway.”
Others, such as Santa Ana Unified, were not planning on using them.
“The information has been very long in coming,” said Garden Grove Unified Superintendent
Gabriela Mafi, who said that as recently as the beginning of March her district had not been
provided with log-in information that would enable students to take the interim assessments.
Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Michael Hanson offered teachers in his district
the option of giving interim assessments, but he expected few teachers would want to use them
now.
“They look at this and they go, ‘I already have a testing cycle coming up. I don’t want to spend
any more time on this when there’s really not anything I can do with the results between now and
the time I’m going to give the exam [the Smarter Balanced assessments] anyway,’” he said.
“The best we can do now is offer it as an option,” he said. “People would be in absolute mutiny
if you tried to force them [the assessments] on them right before we do the actual testing.”
Visalia Unified Superintendent Craig Wheaton said he wished that the interim assessments had
been available six months earlier. He said his district has pulled together a group of teachers to
use them in a systematic fashion, and that some began using them as soon as they became
available.
“We were really trying to have an organized pilot and were exploring how to share them,” he
said. But their late delivery thwarted plans to use the assessments extensively in the district, he
said.
The Smarter Balanced consortium promoted the interim assessments on its website as “one of the
three major components of the Smarter Balanced Assessment System.”
The other two components were a digital library of so-called “formative assessments” – tools and
practices that teachers could use to see how students are doing to help “form” the instruction they
receive – and the end-of-year “summative assessments” students will take this spring measuring
the “sum” of what students learned during the year.
By contrast, the interim assessments were intended for use by teachers “throughout the year to
gauge student progress toward mastery of the skills measured by the summative assessment and
to assess targeted concepts at strategic points during the school year.”
Santa Ana Superintentendent Rick Miller said his district was never planning to use the interim
assessments extensively, and that teachers had been using their own “formative” tools in the
classroom to assess student progress. “We are doing things other than interim assessments,” he
said.
The interim assessments come in two forms. One is the Interim Comprehensive Assessment,
which is essentially the same test as the final summative assessment. It runs at least seven
hours and includes math and English Language Arts, according to information on the website of
the California Department of Education. The other assessment is the Interim Block Assessment.
That test is not longer than an hour and is focused on a particular subject area, such as math, or
even more specific areas, such as a week’s lesson in algebra or geometry.
Elise Darwish, chief academic officer for Aspire Public Schools, a charter management
organization with 35 schools around the state, said that some Aspire schools are using the
“block” interim assessments focused on discrete parts of the curriculum. She said it was tempting
to administer the Interim Comprehensive Assessment, but Aspire officials did not think it was
viable.
“I’m dying to know how our kids are going to do,” she said. “But it is too much to ask for kids to
spend seven hours in March on a practice test when they’re going to take the actual test in two
months anyway.”
As a result of the delays, California will receive a credit on some of the funds it paid the Smarter
Balanced consortium to produce the interim assessments. The cost of the assessments was
bundled with the cost of producing the digital library for teachers. That total was $3.35
million. Keric Ashley, interim deputy superintendent of public instruction, did not disclose the
amount of California’s credit, but said at a recent State Board of Education meeting that “it
would not be insignificant.”
Some teachers who have used the interim assessments said they were useful. Thanh Vo, a math
teacher at Gompers K-8 school in Lakewood, used one of the Interim Block Assessments that
was an overview of 7th-grade math to see what his 8th-graders remembered from last year. He said
it took students only 45 minutes to complete the hour-long test, which included algebra and
geometry, but the results were enlightening.
In particular, the test results showed Vo that his 8th-graders had forgotten the formulas for
calculating the volume of shapes like cylinders and cones, which they had covered for a couple
of weeks in 7th grade. Based on those results, Vo reworked his approach to teaching volume
calculation.
For example, he had his students apply formulas for volume to real-life situations. One popular
problem was asking his students to calculate the volume of a pizza he brought in to class.
Debbie Williams, a math coordinator for the San Joaquin County Office of Education who works
with smaller districts in the Central Valley, said besides helping teachers understand where their
students are in learning math and English tied to the Common Core, the interim assessments
would have given students the chance to see what the year-end assessments will look like.
“There are kids who didn’t take the [Smarter Balanced] field test last year,” she said. “They’re
going to come up to the computer to take it for the first time, and it’s going to be a shock for
them if they’ve never seen it before.”