Smarter Balanced Assessments And Critical Thinking Level

In 2014-15 the Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) became the de facto assessments in Oregon and many other states, and educators across the country grappled with the high-level skill and content mastery required by these assessments. At REALMS, we examined these assessments carefully and together, and we quickly realized that they gave our students an opportunity to tackle test items requiring significantly higher level literacy skills and an increased ability to solve more open ended math problems that require application of concepts to new contexts. We also realized that the SBAC assessment items looked more like the kinds of tasks our students tackle in the classroom each day than did the previous generation of assessment items that tended to emphasize content over skill and lower level thinking tasks. Our curriculum was already better aligned to these new assessments than it was to the older OAKS assessments, although there was still work to be done as we looked for ways to revise our curriculum to help students meet the higher bar set by the SBAC assessments.

For the past two years, our students have shown great tenacity and dedication when taking these assessments, and their scores compared to district and state peers reflect their hard work and skill level when it comes to higher level literacy skills and open ended math problem solving. We believe these scores are evidence that our curriculum, our emphasis on high quality student work, and our focus on Habits of Work is working. Students have the skills and the mindsets they need to excel. The graphs below show that not only are our students performance levels high, but more importantly, our “median growth percentiles” exceed district and state averages, showing that REALMS students are moving ahead further and faster!