Day Four & Five
Objective: SWBAT to show his/her knowledge on a baseline benchmark test.
Big Idea: To help guide instruction for the year and establish a baseline for quarterly benchmark assessments, students will take a benchmark test aligned to the CCSS.
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Baseline Benchmark Testing
To establish a baseline of knowledge as required by my district, I spend the last two days of week 1 administering a benchmark test. While our district contracts with a company for these tests, none are 100% aligned with the Common Core State Standards. For this reason, we sought an alternative test that we could give. Gratefully, several states who are several years ahead of Oklahoma in CCSS alignment and adoption openly share their lessons and assessments via the internet. My team selected an 8th grade math Regents Exam from New York
This assessment has three parts: A traditional multiple choice section and two constructed response sections. In the interest of time, instead of using all of the tests, we decided to give Book 1 with 27 multiple choice questions. We then selected 10 questions from Books 2 & 3. We selected questions that would provide us the widest range of information about students' understanding and their approaches to problem-solving.
Once students completed both sections, we graded them and organized the data in a spreadsheet so it could easily be tracked by standard. We did this by coding each student response as either 1 (if it was correct) or 0 (if it was incorrect). We then coded each question by standard. Results overall were low, but not surprising as this is the first year CCSS will be taught to students in our state.
