April Showers and April Data Dump
Tuesday is the day to share a “Slice of Life” with Two Writing Teachers. Check out the writers, readers and teachers here.
April Showers have been devastating in many regions of the United States this week. Equally devastating is the April Data Dump that is happening in many schools across the United States. Are you drowning in data?
How many of these pieces of data have you accumulated for each of your students?
- National Assessments
- Local Assessments
- Benchmark Assessments
- MAP
- STAR Reading
- STAR Math
- NWEA
- Accelerated Reader Tests
- Unit Tests
- Screeners
- Formative Assessments
- Book Logs
- Rubrics
- Checklists
- Running Records
- Observations
Do you have others that are not on the list? Does each piece of data match up and tell the same story or is there a dissonance from conflicting data including the student’s work in the classroom during reading or writing workshop? What is the role of data in instruction?
Which assessments REALLY inform your instruction?
What do you change, today, in your instruction as a result of your assessment data?
How do you make a mid-class period correction to ensure every student is learning?
When you have data collected, it needs to be organized and then it needs to be USED to inform instruction. This sounds simple but additional ideas about data are shared by Brianna Friedman at her blog entitled “Adventures in Staff Development” and more specifically in her February 18th post, “What Does the Data Say?” In today’s slice, Jana tells a story from the view of teachers reviewing the data in “Data Review – – Evaluation or Judgement?”
The number of days left in this school year are finite. If you are counting those days, my hope is that you have set your end goal targets and are counting the days in order to allocate precious, finite resources that will help all students reach the targets. Every minute, hour, and day is an opportunity for student learning!
How are you utilizing data to inform instruction and maximize student learning in order to meet your end of the year goals?
PARCC – Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers
My last post was about Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) because my home state of Iowa will be using these in the future. That post included a link to some sample assessment items as they will look online and additional released SBAC test items. Today’s post provides a brief glimpse into the sample assessments currently available from Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
Item and Task prototypes can be found for both English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics at http://www.parcconline.org/samples/item-task-prototypes
Representative Samples
Summative assessments for ELA are available at the following grade-level links. Do click on the pdf’s below the task for additional information about teacher directions and the intent of the task.
Permissions are still pending so the entire task is NOT yet posted for any grade level. The link does describe the “type of assessment” that is included.
Grade 3 http://www.parcconline.org/samples/english-language-artsliteracy/grade-3-tecr-end-year-assessment
How could you use this information?
Discussions at your grade level could center around these questions:
Is this the text that your students are reading? Do you have common formative assessments at your grade level?
These samples could help you frame common tasks and instruction for reading, writing, and speaking! Should you assess your students using these tasks? ONLY, if you have provided instruction that would be aligned with the tasks! 🙂
Resource - Full 