Smarter Balanced Claims Sue Bluestein Wendy Droke

Assessment Claims for Mathematics “Students can demonstrate progress toward college and career readiness in mathematics.” “Students can demonstrate college and career readiness in mathematics.” “Students can explain and apply mathematical concepts and interpret and carry out mathematical procedures with precision and fluency.” “Students can solve a range of complex well-posed problems in pure and applied mathematics, making productive use of knowledge and problem solving strategies.” “Students can clearly and precisely construct viable arguments to support their own reasoning and to critique the reasoning of others.” “Students can analyze complex, real-world scenarios and can construct and use mathematical models to interpret and solve problems.” Overall Claim (Gr. 3-8) Overall Claim (High School) Claim 1 Concepts and Procedures Claim 2 Problem Solving Claim 3 Communicating Reasoning Claim 4 Modeling and Data Analysis

In English What this means is: Claim 1 – Normal questions you ask in class, very procedural, easy to write, easy for kids to figure out what the question is asking. Claim 2 – Straight forward problem solving. May ask a student to do the equivalent of a claim 1 type question but backwards.

In English Claim 3 – Communication and reasoning questions. Critique someone’s argument, give an example to prove or disprove, Construct a chain of reasoning, find the assumptions an argument uses, break down a situation into cases (this is true when a is less than1, but not true if a is greater than or equal to 1, etc) Claim 4 – Less straight forward problem solving. Generally what this looks like is multiple step problem solving. Find one answer and then use it to find something else.

My realizations during Item Writing What I realized through writing lots of higher claim (Claims 2-4) items was that I do an excellent job teaching my students to answer Claim 1 questions. I do a fairly good job teaching them to answer Claim 2 questions. I was doing a LOUSY job even giving my students Claim 3 and 4 items to work on in class, let alone on anything like an assessment (formative or summative)

Claim 3 and 4 These questions require a higher level of reading – students MUST read through the entire question well Students can’t rely on the context to figure out what a question is asking them to do There are key vocabulary words that a student is expected to know – and if they don’t they won’t have any idea what a question is asking them to do Bottom line: If they haven’t seen it before, they won’t do well on it when it comes to test time.

Reactions Do I really need to teach this? Are these actually going to show up on the test? To answer these questions, I got out the test blueprint (link at end and on e-board so you can find it later)

Grade 3-5 Claim 1 = 20 items Claim 2 and 4 = 9 items Claim 3 = 8 items Please note: This is number of items, not weighting of claims, which is not necessarily equal, they haven’t yet released the actual weighting.

Grade 6-8 Claim 1 = items Claim 2 and 4 = 9 items Claim 3 = 8 items

Grade 11 Claim 1 = 22 items Claim 2 and 4 = 9 items Claim 3 = 8 items

Conclusions Students will be spending about HALF of the time they are taking the test working on Upper level claim items. Upper level claim items are (really) how SBAC will assess the 8 Mathematical Practices Claim 2 = 1, 5, 7, 8 Claim 3 = 3, 6 Claim 4 = 2, 4, 5 I can’t just ignore these and hope they go away