Using Google Docs to prepare students for Smarter Balanced Assessments

Posted by Majid Manzarpour

Jennifer Oliveira is a Google Certified Trainer who works at Del Mar Union School District in San Diego, California. She has over 18 years of experience in the education field and specializes in Google Apps & Chromebook deployments. You can find her on Google+ and the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to preview the Smarter Balanced Testing practice tests, now would be a good time. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is one of the two nationally approved assessments aligned with Common Core, as well as being an adaptive assessment, suitable for all students including students with disabilities. 

"Although our new WI state test is called the 3-8 Grade Badger Exam, I am told the students need to have the following technology skills to be successful." Kathy Hoppe.

Last year, school districts around the country piloted the English Language Arts (ELA) and Math tests and this year schools will have another opportunity to preview the test. In our elementary district, we had classroom teachers logon to their grade level and see what the kids would see. Going through the third grade assessment as a teacher my initial thoughts were more self-conscious, “This is a third grade test. I can do this. I passed third grade.” As I worked through the test, my thoughts shifted to concern, whether our elementary students would be successful. I don’t have any doubts about whether or not they have the knowledge. It’s more about the format. For many us, transitioning to a computer adaptive assessment is new territory. Our students, and many students around the country, are used to multiple choice, pencil and paper exams and some students have had opportunity to complete a multiple choice assessment on a computer. 

The Smarter Balanced assessment asks students to use a variety of technology skills to respond to multiple formats of questions. Now, my thoughts shift yet again. Our students know how to be successful at this test, they just need some help connecting the dots. Using Google Apps in elementary schools can strengthen technology skills needed in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

How it looks in SBAC: (Image from SBAC Practice Test Portal)	How Google Docs can help: (Image from Google Apps for Education)
In the ELA portion of the test, some of the questions require students to highlight phrases as part of their answer. For example, students need to read passages, then choose by highlighting the correct answer. Sometimes they need to highlight two possible answers. (image from SBAC Practice Test Portal)	Students can practice highlighting phrases in their writing showing examples of certain writing strategies, vocabulary, or editing skills.
Both ELA and Math require dragging and dropping. In the ELA portion, students might need to rearrange sentences so the paragraph makes chronological sense. In the Math portion, students need to drag numbers to boxes to show missing measurements. Sometimes they need to drag numbers to create two-digit numbers (see example below).	Using Google Docs, students can practice moving sentences from one part of their writing to another by dragging and aligning the cursor with the new location. In Google Draw, students can create shapes and move them around the page to create an image.
In the Math portion, students might be asked to draw a line to divide a shape. (image from SBAC Practice Test Portal)	Using Google Draw, students can practice creating shapes with the line or shape tools.
In the Math portion, students are asked to devise an equation to match the area of a grid.	Using Sheets, students can format and outline cells to create shapes, then create matching equations for area or perimeter.
The ELA portion has some open-ended responses. In some instances, students are asked to revise an already created paragraph.	Using Google Docs, students can practice writing reading responses or brief explanations, comparisons, or opinions. Students can then share with a peer who can add or revise the writing.
The ELA portion has a few audio or visual components.	Using Slides, students can prepare presentations, then compose questions for peers to answer. For added fun, invite students to create hyperlinks to slides within the presentation to create a quiz.

Using Google Apps and other practical applications, students can enhance the technology skills needed to be successful on Smarter Balanced. They may not realize it they have the skills, we can help them make the connection.

from http://blog.synergyse.com/2014/03/using-google-docs-to-prepare-for.html

"I Don't Know What to Write About."

"I Don't Know What to Write About."

For those of you who know me, you know that one of the greatest joys in my role as a literacy specialist is working with young writers.  When I observe those students who are reluctant writers, I find that the biggest obstacle is that they don't know what to write about or so they believe.  The first thing I encourage them to do, as well as their teachers, is to keep a writer's notebook with the first entries to be of things that they notice.

Ralph Fletcher says, “Writers are like other people, except for at least one important difference. Other people have daily thoughts and feelings, notice this sky or that smell, but they don’t do much about it. All those thoughts, feelings, sensations, and opinions pass through them like the air they breathe. Not writers. Writers react.”  

One way to react is to record their reactions in a notebook...just like these two young girls who were recently featured on The Today Show.  Watch the clip yourself or show it to your students.  Get inspired to start notebooking and never have to wonder what to write about again.

http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/50506311#50506311

This blurb comes from http://lookinatliteracy.blogspot.com/ with Mary Huberty. Mary and I worked on a Notebooking Two District Partnership with UWGB. Notebooking is an exciting way to get kids excited and ready to write.

Fascinating ..........this reminds me of a superb teacher I know here who loves promoting books!

Children Don’t Know How to Close the Vocabulary Gap

by Lisa Hansel
December 3rd, 2014

Most children don’t even know there is a vocabulary gap. They don’t know that reading about a wide variety of topics is the best way to acquire new vocabulary. They don’t know that books (even children’s books) use a wider variety of vocabulary than adults’ conversation. They don’t know that reading several texts on the same topic—and thus staying focused on that topic for two to three weeks—can make vocabulary learning up to four times faster.

Nor do they know what they need to learn. They don’t know what science, history, geography, civics, art, and music content they will be asked to master in later years (if they are lucky enough to attend schools that have a rich curriculum). They don’t know how much more fulfilling their lives would be if they “had a dream” or asked “What’s in a name?” or grasped “one giant leap for mankind.”

What children know is what they’ve been taught—at home, by commercials, at school, by neighbors…. Fortunately, virtually all children do share a wonderful quality that makes them eager to learn: curiosity.

To close the vocabulary gap, adults must do a better job of capitalizing on that curiosity to broaden children’s knowledge. And we must do it early, while the curiosity is so strong and the vocabulary gap is relatively small.

Since you’re reading the Core Knowledge blog, you already know that the first thing to do is write a content-rich, carefully sequenced curriculum for preschool through at least the elementary grades. What else can we do? One thing I think teachers and parents should consider is more carefully curating the books that children have to choose from. With a little gentle guidance, children can become curious about a great variety of topics. Take archeology for example. What kid would not be fascinated by digging in dirt and excavating tombs to find ancient people, stories, and treasures?

For resistant readers, let’s get creative about branching out from their current interests (which, don’t forget, are rarely “natural”; they’re often induced by commercial enterprises). Star Wars could be a great invitation to some astronomy books. Perhaps Sponge Bob could lead to marine biology. Especially if these subjects are introduced with read-alouds by a parent or teacher, kids can get hooked—and get the crucial introduction to a topic that makes comprehension easier—before they try to read about these topics  on their own.

Child in need of guidance courtesy of Shutterstock.

Susan Neuman and Donna Celano provide an excellent example of curated choice vs. free choice in their decade-long study of two Philadelphia libraries: Chestnut Hill, in a high-income area by the same name, and Lillian Marrero, in the low-income Badlands area.

In the Chestnut Hill library, children always seem to enter the preschool area accompanied by an adult—most often their mother but occasionally a father, a nanny, or a grandmother. In comparison, in the Badlands, young children almost always enter alone, sometimes with a sibling but very rarely with an adult. Occasionally, an older brother or cousin might help locate a book or read to them. But more often than not, we see short bursts of activity, almost frenetic in nature. With little to do, children wander in and out with relatively little focus. Rarely are books checked out.

For children in Chestnut Hill, the activities are highly routinized. Invariably, the accompanying parent takes charge, suggesting books, videos, or audio books to check out. Sometimes the parent might pull a book down and let the child examine it or ask a child what types of books to look for. But the parents are clearly in charge: in a very authoritative manner, they sometimes note, “That book is too hard for you,” “That is too easy,” or “This one might be better.” Parents steer children to challenging selections, sometimes appeasing them with a video selection as well. Visits are brief, highly focused, and without exception, end with checking out a slew of books and, often, DVDs.

Inside the spacious preschool area at Lillian Marrero, separated from the rest of the library by “castle walls,” we find bins and baskets, crates and shelves full of books, and small tables with computers…. A mother sits 10 feet away in a chair marking her book with a yellow highlighter while her 6-year-old son explores the stacks alone. He forays several times for books, returning with selections to show his mother for her approval. “No, we’ve already seen them,” she says, sending him back to find something new. He returns several minutes later. Collecting what appears to be one, two, or three items from him, the mother gathers the rest of her belongings. Before she heads for the door, she points to the librarian who is now sitting at her desk. “Say bye to the lady,” the mother says to the little boy. “Bye-bye, lady,” he dutifully responds….

For early literacy, these differences have profound implications. In the spirit of concerted cultivation, toddlers and preschoolers in Chestnut Hill appear to be carefully mentored in selecting challenging materials; in contrast, those who experience the process of natural growth in the Badlands receive little, if any, coaching. Left on their own, these children resort to playful activity of short bursts, picking books up and putting them down with little discrimination and involvement. In Chestnut Hill, activities are carefully orchestrated to encourage reading for individual growth and development; in the Badlands, no such mentoring is available—the children are on their own.

Jane E Pollock helps us reflect on our Interactive Notebooks

Jane E Pollock helps us reflect on our Interactive Notebooks

Here is a visual reminder of the format for the Interactive Notebook.

Planning for critical thinking and the 9 high-yield strategies is key for the teacher. Using an Interactive Notebook then insures that the students are engaged at a high level too.

Here is a visual you can use.

Excellence is understanding those who worry about being worthy certainly are.....

Excellence is understanding those who worry about being worthy certainly are.....

As we close out on 2014 in the coming weeks, we look at what has been accomplished thus far. So much has been accomplished - curriculum work, piloting ELA, scoring guide attempts, reading focus, Educator Effectiveness and then magically putting it together to inspire our students--- and we should sigh with satisfaction at all the pieces we continuously juggle better than we think we do. It is at this time that we must remind ourselves that, teaching is challenging.  It is continuous progress not perfection, because things are changing at such a rapid pace, that matters. It is not teachers and educators who get feedback and look back and regret, but those who look forward, reflect and continuously refine that are the excellent ones.  The struggle will continue yet the fight is worthy for someone called to be deemed an "educator" whether that is a teacher, support staff or administrator.  It takes the whole school community to support and grow our most precious "products" --- the flowering and flourishing children.  Way to go educators - way to water those seeds of learning.  You are most deserving for a break to prepare for the continued journey in the new year.

The Best Ways to Prepare Students for Common Core Reading Tests

In an article in The Reading Teacher, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/ Chicago) says the “data-driven” approach to improving reading achievement – using item analyses to identify the skills students haven’t mastered and drilling test-aligned curriculum items – doesn't work. Why? “Research long ago revealed an important fact about reading comprehension tests: they only measure a single factor…” says Shanahan: “reading comprehension. They don’t reveal students’ abilities to answer main idea questions, detail questions, inference questions, drawing conclusion questions, or anything else.”

Shanahan believes there are two reasons traditional standardized reading tests fail to produce useful data on subskills:

• First, reading is a language activity, not the execution of various subskills. To make sense of a text, students must simultaneously use a hierarchy of language features. When a student answers a main-idea question incorrectly, it doesn't mean the main-idea part of the student’s brain isn’t working. Here are some possible explanations:

- The passage looked too hard and the student didn't have the confidence to read it all the way through.

- The student is a slow reader and didn't read far enough to grasp the main idea.

- The student’s decoding skills are weak and a lot of important words weren't understood.

- The main idea was embedded in a particularly complex sentence, and although the student understood the rest of the text, this sentence wasn't understood.

- The text had a lot of synonyms and pronouns and the student wasn't able to form a coherent idea of what it was all about.

So what does explain students’ performance on standardized tests? Text complexity, says Shanahan: “[I]f the text is easy enough, students can answer any type of question, and if the text is complicated enough, they will struggle with even the supposedly easiest types of questions. That means reading comprehension tests measure how well students read texts, not how well they execute particular reading skills…”

• Second, reading tests are designed to separate proficient from struggling readers. To achieve this and create reliable tests, psychometricians reject questions that don’t have the best properties. “Test designers are satisfied by being able to determine how well students read and by arraying students along a valid reading comprehension scale,” says Shanahan. “They know that the items collectively assess reading comprehension, but that separately – or in small sets of items aimed at particular kinds of information – the items can tell us nothing meaningful about how well students can read.”

Won’t the innovative tests being created by PARCC and Smarter Balanced do a better job? Not at producing useful data on subskills, says Shanahan. “These new tests won’t be able to alter the nature of reading comprehension or the technical requirements for developing reliable test instruments.” The simple reason is that they can’t be long and fine-grained enough. So does that mean the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests will be useless to educators and parents? Not at all, says Shanahan: “These tests will ask students to read extensive amounts of literary and informational text, to answer meaningful questions about these texts, and to provide explanations of their answers. These tests should do a pretty good job of showing how well students can read and comprehend challenging texts without teacher support.”

So how should we prepare students to do well on the new tests – and be prepared for college and career success? Not by focusing instruction on question types, says Shanahan – instead, by striving to make students “sophisticated and powerful readers.” Here’s how:

• Have students read extensively within lessons – not free reading, but reading that is an integral part of instruction, with students frequently held accountable for understanding and gaining knowledge. Round-robin oral reading is highly inefficient, says Shanahan. “Teachers like it because it provides control and it lets them observe how well a student is reading, but a reading comprehension lesson, except with the youngest children, should emphasize silent reading – and lots of it.” And this should also be happening in social studies, science, and math classes.

• Have students read increasing amounts of text without guidance and support. Many reading lessons involve students reading a paragraph or a page followed by teacher questions and group discussion. “This model is not a bad one,” says Shanahan. “It allows teachers to focus students’ attention on key parts of the text and to sustain attention throughout. However, the stopping points need to be progressively spread out over time… Increasing student stamina and independence in this way should be a goal of every reading teacher.” It’s noteworthy that the shortest prototype that PARCC and SBAC have released so far is 550 words long.

• Make sure the texts are rich in content and sufficiently challenging. “Lots of reading of easy text will not adequately prepare students for dealing with difficult text,” says Shanahan. They need to be reading grade-level texts with gradually decreasing teacher scaffolding around vocabulary, sentence grammar, text structure, and concepts needed to reach target levels.

• Have students explain their answers and provide text evidence supporting their claims.This is an important part of increasing intellectual depth and constantly moving students toward reading more-challenging material.

• Engage students in writing about text. Writing does a much better job of improving reading comprehension than answering multiple-choice questions, says Shanahan: “Although writing text summaries and syntheses may not look like the tests students are being prepared for, this kind of activity should provide the most powerful and productive kind of preparation.”

(from the Marshall Memo 12.9.2014) “How and How Not to Prepare Students for the New Tests” by Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher, November 2014 (Vol. 68, #3, p. 184-188), http://bit.ly/1wr4JOa; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu.