Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Keyword: Curriculum and Instruction

K–2 Assessment Systems Enable Early Intervention to Foster Student Success

Across the United States, statewide assessments in English language arts and mathematics are federally mandated each school year in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. The intent is to help educators, policymakers, and parents directly gauge how students and their school systems are performing against state standards.

Missing nationwide, however, is any systematic state-level attempt to evaluate students’ ongoing progress in grades K–2, the grades that lay the foundation for all later learning.

This paper focuses on this lag in K–2 assessment systems and how states can act to address it. We first review a range of assessment types and their utility for supporting learning in the early years of schooling. We then discuss research findings on state K–2 assessment policies that provide insights for other policy leaders to consider as they work to build K–2 assessment systems that effectively help districts and schools support academic success for their youngest students.

Scaffolding Writing With the “Teaching and Learning Cycle” for Students in Grades 6–12

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to “get the job done” — in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their teachers are in a unique position to demystify how language works in written texts in their content areas, but they may not know of specific methods for doing so.

Authored by Pamela Spycher, Senior Research Associate at WestEd, this article addresses these challenges by offering concrete ideas so teachers across the disciplines can add to their existing repertoires and support their students to be better writers. Teachers will find that the ideas offered are especially useful for their students who are learning English as an additional language (herein referred to as multilingual learners); however, they may decide that particular methods are also beneficial for their English-proficient students.

Strong Professional Learning Systems for Math Instruction in California: What Do We Know Today?

The coming months are an opportune time to reexamine the professional learning infrastructure around math teaching in California. In addition to the re-conceptualized instructional guidance and the emphasis on equity put forth in the math framework revision that’s now underway, California counties, local education agencies, and schools are also rebuilding their policies and systems for the 2021/22 school year and acknowledging lessons learned from the pandemic and its differential impacts on certain groups of students. Our latest knowledge brief aims to inform state and district leaders about options regarding effective professional learning for California math educators in advance of the adoption of the new math framework in 2022.

This brief summarizes California math teachers’ survey responses from spring 2020 about the professional learning they received during the 2019/20 school year —both before and during the period of school closures due to COVID-19 —and describes key steps education leaders can take to support the implementation of the new framework. It also compares views of California math teachers with those of non-California math teachers and with those of California teachers who teach other subjects.

Ethnic Studies Legislation: State Scan

Reviewing state efforts to develop and implement curricula that reflects and affirms students’ racial and ethnic identities, Sylvia Kwon from the Region 15 Comprehensive Center developed this summary of recent and ongoing states’ ethnic studies legislation. For the purposes of this scan, “ethnic studies” encompasses coursework that purposefully reflects and supports students’ identities. Kwon examines state legislative initiatives (enacted between February 2019 and January 2021) that require ethnic studies to be incorporated into K–12 standards or curricula.

Kwon’s scan details legislative efforts in 19 states, along with summarizing the legislation’s implementation timeline.

WestEd’s Standards‐to‐Standards Alignment and Evaluation Studies

WestEd’s content and assessment experts are available to conduct standards-to-standards alignment studies, which provide: findings to meet rigorous evidence requirements, such as federal peer review guidelines; and key feedback that contributes to quality content standards. This service is available for a range of grade levels and content areas.

WestEd’s Curriculum‐to‐Standards Alignment Studies

WestEd’s content and assessment experts are available to conduct curriculum-to-standards alignment studies, which provide: findings on the alignment between local curricula and state content standards, and key feedback that contributes to quality standards-based curricula. This service is available for a range of grade levels and content areas.