The Journal (10/11, Schaffhauser) reports that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium has "released a sizable sampling of online assessment items, giving teachers, educational leaders, and members of the public an early look at what kinds of items and tasks will appear on the high-stakes tests that are due to debut in the 2014-2015 school year." The piece notes that the group is developing assessments designed to dovetail with the Common Core Standards, adding that the other consortium developing such an assessment system, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, has already released such a sampling.
The Hechinger Report (10/11, Zhao) also runs an article about the previews of the new assessments, exploring the question of whether the new curriculum and tests will "really revolutionize how we measure whether children are learning." The piece describes the blend of "computer enhanced" questions and traditional multiple choice questions, adding, "One of the biggest concerns about the new tests has been how to finance them. The two coalitions designing the tests won grants from the federal government to pay for the beginning of the process, but this funding won't cover ongoing expenses related to the tests, like paying people to score answer sheets and the cost of new computers and expanded bandwidth."
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