As the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) becomes an official 501(c)(3) to become more sustainable, they are also continuing to roll out preparation tools for their expected 2014-15 school year testing.
PARCC and Smarter Balanced are the two education consortia charged with creating assessments to measure student attainment of Common Core standards. There is a lot of pressure on these two organizations to create tests that align well with new curriculum, transcend the traditional paper-based multiple choice tests, and gauge student readiness for 21st century challenges.
About their shift to becoming an official non-profit, the chair of the PARCC Governing Board, Mitchell Chester said, “I am pleased with the progress the consortium continues to make in developing PARCC, the next generation assessment system that is aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The creation of a non-profit entity establishes a state-led governance structure to oversee the administration and sustainability of these new assessments.”
Launching the non-profit is the first step in the process to ensuring the PARCC assessment system can be sustained in the long term and beyond the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top Assessment grant period which ends in September 2014.
“This is an important step to ensure a seamless transition from the development stage of the PARCC next generation assessments to their implementation,” said New Jersey Education Commissioner and PARCC Governing Board member Chris Cerf. “This non-profit will ensure that states continue to be at the forefront of new, more meaningful Common Core-aligned assessments.”
Meanwhile, in their day to day work of preparing the tests to evaluate the new Common Core standards, PARCC recently released a Capacity Planning Tool to help schools and districts be more prepared to navigate the new tests.
Following is more information from a press release about the new tools for education professionals:
Preparing for this type of assessment, one that is computer-based and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), necessitates changes in how schools prepare. The PARCC Assessment Administration Capacity Planning Tool provides schools and districts with a calculator that supports local technology budgeting and decision-making in preparation for computer-based administration of the tests in the 2014-2015 school year. This is a tool that administrators and school leaders have requested from the consortium to help them plan for a successful test administration in two years.
PARCC is also releasing guidance that provides schools and districts with more information about the design of the PARCC assessments in English language arts/literacy and mathematics, as well as the number of testing sessions and the approximate time it will take students to complete the assessments.
Unlike many current state assessments, the PARCC assessments will provide information on the full range of knowledge and skills needed to be career- and college-ready or on track toward that goal. And, they will measure the skills and knowledge of students working significantly beyond or behind their grade level. These improvements from many current tests will help teachers guide instruction and give more information to students and their parents.
Other advances in the PARCC system not available with many current state tests:
–A college- and career-ready determination that two- and four-year colleges and universities in PARCC states can use to place students into entry-level, credit-bearing courses.
–Separate reading and writing scores from the English language arts/literacy assessment.
–A measure of student growth.
–Results returned within weeks of the assessment.
For more information, please see http://www.parcconline.org/assessment-administration-guidance
