New Hope Elementary School students have spent the majority of this year preparing for the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) testing. Teachers are working extremely hard to create opportunities for students to learn how to use the technology for a variety of purposes. It is so important that they understand the technology device and how to effectively use it for the “real” testing. When you add some slow Internet connections to the mix, what has been painstakingly developed does not always go as planned to the frustration of everyone.
While much has been said about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the standards have allowed teachers to be creative and flexible to meet the needs of our students. Talk that the CCSS are “dumbed down” must be coming from someone who cannot fully understand or be familiar with these standards. Certainly they are not peeking over the shoulder of a student that is taking the Interim Assessments, which are now available.
Our students started taking them on February 2. It’s been difficult to administer them due to the low connectivity, but staff and students, with the awesome support of the Information Technology department from the San Joaquin County Office of Education, have been valiantly doing their best. Each grade level has been taking far longer then the recommended time. The tests are a challenge for even the strongest of our students.
It will be interesting to see the results of these assessments. It’s puzzling that the writing sections will be scored and submitted by the teachers, so the results can be added to the machine scored portions of the test. There are no training modules developed yet to assist teachers with their scoring. We look forward to seeing what a student score report looks like, so that we can know what information we will be provided to adjust and modify instruction. It’s going to be an interesting journey this spring.
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