Victoria Coburn LUSD

For my assessment pieces, I chose a variety of assessment formats and chose

assessments that spanned the K Algebra levels. For the K 3 level assessments, I had
three students in the third grade take a constructed response type assessment. For the
fourth through sixth grade span, I chose a selected response type assessment, and for the
algebra level, I used Engage New Yorks pre-made Mid-Module Assessment Task, which
was more on the extended constructed level. Both the constructed response assessment
and extended constructed assessment came with a very thorough rubric. The assessment
used for the 4 6 exam, which was a multiple-choice test only included an answer key. I
would then need to go through each question and see what standard it addressed and
maybe make some kind of graph to figure out what standards students knew, and what
standards I need to reteach. I can see this would be even more difficult if I used my test
generator and made many mixed up versions of the same test in order to prevent
neighbors from copying answers. Even though this type of exam is very easy to grade, it
doesnt give me a lot of information. Even if the pre-made multiple-choice exam aligned
with instruction, it is difficult for me to understand exactly how to adjust my instruction.
For the other two grade level spans, I really appreciated the rubrics that clearly spelled
out the students level of understanding.

When I looked up the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium for mathematics on

the computer, it stated: Smarter Balanced assessments will go beyond multiplechoice questions to include extended response and technology enhanced items,

as well as performance tasks that allow students to demonstrate critical-thinking

and problem-solving skills. Performance tasks challenge students to apply their
knowledge and skills to respond to complex real-world problems. They can best
be described as collections of questions and activities that are coherently
connected to a single theme or scenario. These activities are meant to measure
capacities such as depth of understanding assessment questions.. This
approach represents a significant improvement over traditional paper-and-pencil
assessments used in many states today, providing more accurate scores for all
students across the full range of the achievement
continuum.[www.smarterbalanced.org/smarter-balanced-assessment/]. This tells me
that the assessments used by SBAC are more authentic, which means they are more
likely to resemble real world situations. Common Core assessments such as Engage
New York Mathematics uses many different kinds of tests that closely resemble actual
situations in which those abilities are used. For the most part, in my fifth grade
classroom, I use the pre-made Engage New York assessments. In fact, we are required to
by our district. Occasionally I create a formative type assessment for the students. It
really is more for me, to see how my instruction is going. I have to admit, these
formative assessments usually dont resemble real world applications like the Common
Core assessments do. I think I am still stuck in the old school method since all of this is
so new to the staff. This is our first year to implement Engage New York for
mathematics.