 Welcome to the Davis Joint Unified School District Faces and Focus. I'm Maria Clayton, Public Information Officer. Today we'll be talking about assessment and what that means for teachers, students, and even parents in our district. Joining us today is Stephanie Gregson, Director for Curriculum, Assessment and Learning. She'll be giving a presentation on the DJUSD Assessment System with a focus on smarter balanced testing aligned to the common core standards. I'll be letting Director Gregson introduce herself. Thank you, Maria. I come to Davis Joint Unified School District with almost 20 years of education experience starting in Oak Park, Sacramento as a teacher for approximately eight years. I then went to Washington Unified School District with being a principal and coordinator of reading and intervention programs for the district, then became a K-8 principal and Tracy with a school of over 800 students and almost 78 staff members. It's been a pleasure to join the Davis Joint Unified School District as the Director of Curriculum because I also come with experience in the higher education of being an adjunct professor at Sac State, working on a response to intervention certificate program, and teaching courses focusing on English learners and academic language. I'm currently also finishing my dissertation, so it's a very exciting time for me. Today I'm going to be presenting on the Davis Joint Unified School District Assessment System. This is important because our assessment system allows us to make decisions on instructional strategies and instructional programs that will meet all of our students' needs. Our assessment system consists of pieces that assess for learning, which means we are checking students' understanding of what they are learning in classroom. It is also assessments of learning, which we are checking for instructional strategies and instructional programs for their effectiveness. In our strategic plan, Strategy 3 is focused on developing and implementing a district-wide assessment system aligned with the Common Core State Standards. In our local control accountability plan, also known as LCAP, the assessment system is Goal 4. Assessments have been a focus for us during this school year through looking at assessment as a process of reasoning from evidence to inform teaching and learning. Column is a process and includes formative assessments, which are the strategies teachers use in their classroom on a daily basis. Before I get too much into the formative assessment, let's look at this assessment matrix. The first column in red is our assessment for learning the formative assessment process that I'll be explaining in a minute. The green column is our classroom summative interim benchmark assessment piece, and the yellow column is a large-scale summative assessment that I'll explain at the end. In the red column, we're going to be focusing on the formative assessment process. As you can see, a formative assessment has the highest impact on instruction because this is what teachers and students are doing on a daily basis every 10 to 15 minutes sometimes in their classrooms. It consists of journal warm-ups, using individual whiteboards, having students talk with each other and sharing their thoughts and ideas and then sharing with their class. The summative assessment column here in green are assessments or tests that provide a medium impact for instruction because they are given at the end of a unit or the end of a lesson or the end of a semester. So it's not as immediate as a formative assessment. Examples of interim benchmark assessments would be our writing assessments that our 9th and 10th graders take, and assessments that we use for progress on report cards. The summative assessments, which will be the focus of the rest of my presentation, are assessments that are given for school, district, and state accountability. We are used to the CST, or California State Standards Test. This year, we're using the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium Test, which is aligned with our Common Core State Standards. The summative assessments have the lowest impact on instruction because the results that we get cannot impact immediately what we're doing for instructional purposes with the students. But we can make decisions for the future years based on the results that we get. So the rest of the focus of this presentation will be on the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium. What is the SBAC? SBAC is, again, the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium. It is a state-led consortium that works collaboratively with educational partners, researchers, community groups, and educators. It is funded through the U.S. Department of Education as a four-year grant. It is also in partnership with the PARC Assessment, which is the partnership for the assessment of reading for college and careers. SBAC and PARC are similar in that they are both developing assessments that align with the Common Core State Standards. But SBAC uses a computer-adaptive technology, which I'll explain further, when PARC uses computerized assessments but they are not computer-adaptive. Of the 46 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards, approximately 23 are in the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium and the rest are a part of the PARC system. So what does the SBAC look like for your student? If you're in grades 3rd through 8th grade and 11th, you will be taking the English Language Arts and Mathematics test. But if you're in grades 10, you're not off the hook. For 5th grade, 8th grade, and 10th grade, you will still be taking the California State Standards science test. So don't worry, you're still going to be assessed. For our English Language Arts and Mathematics, you'll be taking a computer-adaptive technology assisted piece and then you will also be engaged in the performance task. The types of questions on the computer-adaptive piece of the Smarter Balance Test goes beyond multiple choice. There will be constructed responses. There will be multiple right answers within one question. And the computer-adaptive technology allows for the student questions to be tailored for each student. If a student answers a question incorrectly, the computer will adjust and give them an easier question within the same standard. If they answer a question correctly, they may get a more difficult challenging question within that same standard. So it adjusts the difficulty of the questions based on how students are answering each question. And it adopts to their answers. Right now I'm going to explore with you the SmarterBalance.org website where you can go and get all of the information that you need for any question that you have on the Smarter Balance Assessment. The website is SmarterBalance.org. And as you can see, it is fully functional with lots of information. If you are a parent and you have some questions that you would like to be answered, there is a parent and student tab here. And if you scroll down, there is a frequently asked question section for you to click on and decide which area you have a question on. For this presentation, let's explore some of the question types that your students may be experiencing and that you can access from home at any time you want. Here's our practice and training test site. If you scroll down, you're going to click on take the practice and trainings test. Now we'll have to go through some hoops to get to the actual test, but they're pretty simple. You'll click on the student interface practice and training test. You'll click sign in. You don't need to enter any information. We're going to select grade four and hit yes. As we are a guest, it says guest school. Here is where you have the option of taking the math practice test, the ELA, the English Language Arts Practice Test. You can also take a range of the training tests, third through fifth grade here and third through fifth grade math here. If you would like, you can also explore the performance task in both math and English Language Arts. For the purpose of this presentation, we're going to through the training test for grades third through fifth grade. This here gives you an opportunity to see what available accommodations are there for each student and you're going to hit select and it's going to ask you if this is the test that we're taking. Yes, this is the test we're taking and this is the accommodations we have. You hit yes, start my test. Again we're going to scroll down and hit begin test now. Now you can go through the overview of the testing site if you would like and it gives you a description of some of the features with on the test page. So let's begin. Let's see if we're smarter than a third through fifth grader. So our first question is a standard multiple choice question. When you click an answer, you'll click next. One thing to note is when students are actually taking the real Smarter Balance Assessment test, they will not see any other back buttons or anything because they are taking the assessment through a secure browser that is installed individually on whichever device they're taking the test on. So we're going to hit next. This type of problem is a regular math fluency problem. Students will have the choice of using the buttons on the screen to click their answer or the buttons on the keyboard. They can erase the answer and redo. You can also use the arrow buttons to move the cursor or create a space. This button here creates a fraction. Our next question, this is a fraction question. This is an interactive question for students. Will they need to place the fraction on the correct line, number line placement I should say. Students will have to complete all of this before they can hit next. The last question we'll do together is this one. This is an example of where there are multiple answers within this question. So we've got factors and then we also have multiple and factors. We have neither and again multiple and factor actually just a multiple. So those are about five different types of questions that your students will see. Here's another one where they're going to create a chart and they would click on it. Whichever number would be correct. They can adjust. They can make larger and it's very interactive. When you're ready to exit the practice test you can just click out. If you want to come back and continue working on it you can hit save or pause. So we're going to click out and go back to the Smarter Balanced website. So now you've had exposure to the practice test for the Smarter Balanced assessment. We're going to go back to our presentation and continue because I'd like for you to know the timeline of implementing the Smarter Balanced assessment within Davis Joint Unified. In January through March we're training our site coordinators for entering in all of the accommodations and modifications that any students with special needs will require to take the assessment. In March through April our teachers will be trained with our administration on how to administer this Smarter Balanced assessment test. And in April starting April 20th we begin the window for our Smarter Balanced assessment test administration. So how have we been preparing our students for the Smarter Balanced assessment test? Our students have been able to access the Smarter Balanced assessment practice test through computer labs and the other Chromebook devices that we have on sites. We also have been implementing district-wide performance tasks in kindergarten through sixth grade where students are experiencing real-life problems and solving them together in groups and then working on the written part individually. We also have district interim assessments that are aligned with our Common Core State Standards and the Smarter Balanced assessment. For our teachers, because this is brand new for them as well, we are doing all of our professional growth opportunities with a focus on formative assessment, which is as a reminder is checking for student understanding on a daily basis, sometimes every 10 minutes. Our principals are also working collaboratively on building their understanding of the formative assessment process and how to facilitate conversations with teachers on analyzing student progress and informing instruction along with calibrating their understanding of quality instruction. We have specific training on formative assessments as well. Several site teams have attended a training and are taking that knowledge back to their school sites. Our Instructional Service Advisory Committee focuses on formative assessment process and they are the ones that develop the matrix I showed you earlier. Our Common Core Collaboration Grants are also a part of the professional growth on assessments as teachers are working together on developing performance tasks and aligning their daily formative assessments to the Common Core State Standards and increasing their rigor. If you have questions regarding the Davis Joint Unified School District Assessment System, please feel free to contact me at sgregson at djuust.net. Again, that's sgregson at djuust.net. Well thank you so much for that great presentation and now I just want to take a few minutes to ask some questions that might be on the minds of folks in the community. Let's begin with thinking about the math portion of the practice test. Will students still have an opportunity to use paper and pencil or is everything strictly computer based? No, students will have the opportunity to have scratch paper in front of them so that they can draw any visuals that they need to help them solve the problem or do any computations that they need to do. And does that apply to the English Language Arts section if they want to take notes or? Yes. Okay. Yes. And what about the scoring of these tests? We've, smarter balanced tests are new and in, but California students have been taking them for quite a long time. Is this something that we'll be able to look at these scores and compare them to things of the past? No. We can't compare them at all. They are apples and oranges. Our tests that we've been taking previously, California State Standards test are aligned to the California State Standards that we are no longer implementing. We are now implementing the Common Core State Standards and the Smarter Balanced Assessment is aligned with those standards. So we have two different sets of standards and two different tests. So we cannot compare the two at all. There is even legislation that is against the comparing of these two scores. Okay. And what about the computer adaptability piece of it? Is there a cap and a base to how far the questions will get as far as the challenge? Yes. So the, when a student answers a question correctly and things become more difficult, it only goes up one grade level. If a student answers incorrectly and things get a little bit easier, it goes down one grade level. Great. And we touched a little bit about accommodations. Can you expand on that a little bit and what students might expect to see or parents to give parents a sense of what that is? So if a student needs any accommodations or modifications, one of them is where the answers, well the question and the answers can be read to them through the computer. So they have headphones on and they can click and have it be read to them. There's also highlighters and dictionaries that are available. Accommodations and modifications are entered in by the site coordinator at each site based on their individual education plan or their 504 plan that they have in place. So not all students will have access to whatever the accommodations. All students will have access to some of those accommodations. So we've seen the field test last year. This is the first time that these tests I understand will count. How are the sites preparing for this new environment? So the benefit of doing the field test last year was it did give sites the opportunity to examine their technology in order to administer such a large test. And with this year's assessment we have Google Chromebooks and computer labs that our students have had access to and are becoming familiar with. They'll be doing practice tests on them so that they have an ease and a comfort level when they're doing the smarter balance assessment. Great. Well I think that is extremely helpful information. We appreciate your time and for joining us. And we thank you for joining us as well. If you have any questions or have ideas for topics that we might cover on this program we would love to hear from you. Please email us at communications at djusd.net. That's communications at djusd.net. Thank you so much.