Equally millions of California students prepare to accept the new Smarter Balanced assessments this spring, almost volition not have had the benefit of taking a series of "interim assessments" that were supposed to assistance 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 fashion to rehearse for the Smarter Balanced assessments and permit teachers to come across how well students had mastered the math and English Language Arts curriculum tied to the Mutual Core.

That's not how it has worked out, however. The interim assessments were supposed to be in the easily of educators concluding fall. But the Smarter Counterbalanced Assessment Consortium didn't complete them until the finish of Jan, too late for almost teachers or districts to utilise them extensively, co-ordinate 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 Oct. Information technology was further delayed by exam designers who had to field questions from states near scoring the essay portions of the assessments.

"Ideally, information technology would have been best to take the interim items available in the fall, but circumstances prohibited the rollout before," Willits said.

As a result, superintendents of six school districts EdSource is tracking equally they implement the Common Core said that, for the most part, the interim assessments accept been of limited use. Districts that were counting on giving their students the optional midterm assessments either abased those plans or scaled them back significantly.

"I'k dying to know how our kids are going to do," said Elise Darwish, chief academic officer for Aspire Public Schools. "Only it is as well much to enquire for kids to spend vii hours in March on a exercise test when they're going to take the bodily test in ii months anyhow."

Others, such as Santa Ana Unified, were not planning on using them.

"The data 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 data that would enable students to take the interim assessments.

Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Michael Hanson offered teachers in his district the pick of giving acting assessments, merely he expected few teachers would want to employ them now.

"They expect at this and they go, 'I already have a testing bicycle coming upwards. I don't want to spend any more time on this when there'southward really not anything I tin exercise with the results between now and the time I'm going to give the test [the Smarter Balanced assessments] anyhow,'" he said.

"The best nosotros can do now is offer information technology as an option," he said. "People would be in accented mutiny if you tried to force them [the assessments] on them correct before we practice the actual testing."

Visalia Unified Superintendent Craig Wheaton said he wished that the acting assessments had been bachelor six months earlier. He said his district has pulled together a group of teachers to apply them in a systematic fashion, and that some began using them as before long every bit they became available.

"We were really trying to take an organized pilot and were exploring how to share them," he said. Only 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 Organization."

The other ii components were a digital library of and so-chosen "determinative 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 have this jump measuring the "sum" of what students learned during the yr.

By dissimilarity, the interim assessments were intended for employ by teachers "throughout the yr 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 appraise pupil progress."We are doing things other than interim assessments," he said.

The interim assessments come in ii forms. One is the Interim Comprehensive Assessment, which  is substantially the aforementioned test every bit the last summative assessment. It runs at to the lowest degree 7 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 discipline area, such as math, or even more than specific areas, such equally 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 Cess, but Aspire officials did not think it was viable.

"I'thousand dying to know how our kids are going to exercise," she said. "Merely it is too much to ask for kids to spend seven hours in March on a exercise test when they're going to have the actual exam in two months anyway."

Equally a result of the delays, California volition receive a credit on some of the funds information technology paid the Smarter Balanced consortium to produce the acting assessments. The toll of the assessments was bundled with the cost of producing the digital library for teachers. That total was $3.35 million. Keric Ashley, acting deputy superintendent of public instruction, did not disembalm the corporeality of California's credit, only said at a contempo Country Board of Educational activity meeting that "it would non exist insignificant."

Some teachers who accept used the acting assessments said they were useful. Thanh Vo, a math instructor at Gompers One thousand-8 school in Lakewood, used one of the Interim Block Assessments that was an overview of 7th-grade math to see what his 8thursday-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 eightth-graders had forgotten the formulas for calculating the book 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 grade.

Debbie Williams, a math coordinator for the San Joaquin County Function 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 language tied to the Mutual Core, the interim assessments would accept given students the run a risk to see what the twelvemonth-terminate assessments will wait like.

"There are kids who didn't take the [Smarter Balanced] field test final year," she said. "They're going to come upwards to the calculator to take information technology for the first time, and it's going to be a shock for them if they've never seen it before."

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