Principles for CCSS-Aligned Quality Assessments

 The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has released a set of principles to help in the creation of Common Core-aligned tests. Chris Minnich, Executive Director, Council of Chief State School Officers, writes, the principles “help states hold themselves and their assessments accountable for high quality.”

A review of the principles reveals a tight alignment between what is emphasized with the instructional shifts and what is being expected of SBAC and PARCC. The principles include:

  1. ASSESSING STUDENT READING AND WRITING ACHIEVEMENT IN BOTH ELA AND LITERACY:  The assessments are English language arts and literary tests that are based on an aligned balance between literacy and informational texts.
  2. FOCUSING ON COMPLEXITY OF TEXTS: The assessments require appropriate levels of text complexity; they raise the bar for text complexity each year so students are ready for the demands of college‐ and career level reading no later than the end of high school. Multiple forms of text are assessed, including written, audio, visual, and graphic as technology permits.
  3. REQUIRING STUDENTS TO READ CLOSELY AND USE EVIDENCE FROM TEXT:  The assessments consist of reading  and  writing test  questions, tasks,  and/or  prompts,  as appropriate, that demand that students read carefully and deeply and use specific evidence from increasingly complex texts to obtain and defend correct responses.

The remaining principles and introductory front matter can be found here. The CCSSO were instrumental in moving the Common Core from an initiative to a set of college and career ready standards.


About Aaron Grossman

This entry was posted in CCSSO and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s