Congratulations to Professional Learning Teams who are becoming acquainted with the Common Core State Standards!  As you unwrap priority standards, develop curriculum, and select instructional strategies, you will also assess your students’ progress.  Two questions to guide effective and useful classroom assessment are:

  • How can we accurately measure what our students know and are able to do?
  • How should we modify instruction to optimize student performance?

Classroom Assessments, both formative and summative, consist of selected response, constructed response, and performance assessments.  When your PLT delves into constructing classroom assessments, begin with selected response using multiple choice items.   Although multiple choice items can be tricky to write, your PLT can quickly and effectively gather a great deal of data on student progress.   Correctly constructed multiple choice test items reflect the skills and concepts of the Common Core State Standards.

Planning the Assessment

  1. Refer to the analysis of your priority standard by utilizing your SACI template.
  2. Use the unwrapped standard to guide the creation of the assessment.
  3. Make sure that the skills and concepts are the focus of the assessment.
  4. Also keep in mind the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy inherent in the standard.  Your assessment should reflect the same cognitive level that was utilized during instruction.
  5. Keep in mind:  Tests, don’t trick!

Selecting a passage

  1. Topic: The reading passage should be a topic similar to textual readings the students have been doing in class insuring that students are equipped with necessary background knowledge.
  2. Complexity: The reading passage should also display complexity comparable to reading materials used during instruction.  Lexile both your instructional as well as your assessment materials using the Lexile Analyzer. The Lexile Analyzer is an easy way to determine the difficulty of both instructional materials as well as assessment materials.  http://www.lexile.com/analyzer/
  3. Remember, your assessment measures the skills and concepts of the standard.  It should not be a test of reading comprehension. 

Crafting the Question Stems

Generate skill based question stems to use both during classroom instruction as well as during assessment.  These stems plus the corresponding answer choices should be clearly written at an appropriate reading level.  Both academic and content vocabulary should be familiar to the students.  Stems and answer choices should be free of unintentional clues.  Examples of question stems follow:

Main Idea:

  • The main argument the author makes about _____ is . . .
  • The passage primarily emphasizes . . .

Supporting Detail:

  • The passage clearly indicates . . .
  • Details in the passage suggest . . .

Inference:

  • The passage (or author) implies . . .
  • The reader can infer that . . .

Tone or attitude:

  • The tone of the passage is . . .
  • The writer’s overall feeling toward                                                                is . . .

Drawing Conclusions:

  • This passage is probably taken from (source) . . .
  • With which of the following statements would the author agree?

Meaning of Vocabulary

  • As used in the passage, the word                                              means which of the following?
  • As used in this line or paragraph, the phrase or word most nearly means . . .

Answer options

  1. Provide 4 answer options (1 right answer, 1 option that is close to correct and could reflect a misconception, and 2 options that are distracters).
  2. Answer choices should make sense and be plausible.
  3. Answer choices should be uniform in length and grammar.
  4. Avoid using confusing phrases such as “None of the above” and  “All of the above”.

Format of the Test

  1. The priority standard should be written at the top of the assessment.  Students have a right to know what skills are being assessed.
  2. Font should be readable and uniform throughout the test.
  3. Any charts, graphs, or other visuals should be clearly labeled and easy to see.
  4. Passage lines should be accurately numbered if students must refer to a line of text.
  5. If a passage is on one page and the items on another, make sure these pages face each other rather than duplicated on the front and back of a single sheet.

Peer Review

  1. Once the PLT has created the assessment, it’s time for peer review.
  2. Ask each member of the team to carefully “take” the assessment.  Look for features that might mislead your students such as:  typos, confusing vocabulary, questions and stems that just don’t make sense, or  misleading wording.
  3. Revise  accordingly, keeping in mind the twofold purpose of assessment:
  • How can we accurately measure what our students know and are able to do?
  • How should we modify instruction to optimize student performance?

Administer Assessment & Collect Data

  1. Now it’s time to administer your assessment to your students.
  2. As you score the assessment, compile the data on a measurement system such as Mastery Manager.
  3.  With your PLT, examine the data to analyze both student performance as well as the strengths and flaws of the assessment. The data will indicate the effectiveness of your instruction as well as the strengths and flaws of the test items.

Revise!  

Use the data to revise the Selected Response Assessment.

Congratulations!  If your PLT follows these easy steps you will create a multiple choice assessment that accurately measures student performance and can guide the modification of future instruction!

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