Parent Assessment Event Toolkit
The purpose of this PTA toolkit is to help answer parents’ questions about new state assessments aligned to new college and career readiness standards. The toolkit includes a broad variety of resources, including information about PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments, assessment PowerPoint presentation templates for Common Core-participating states, event-planning tools to inform parents about changes in assessments, assessment fact sheets, and tips to help students prepare for the new standards and assessments.
The purposes of this assessment toolkit are well described on the web site’s home page. Those purposes and more are effectively met through an exceptionally well-designed number of tools to help parents understand new assessments and help their children perform well on new, more challenging tests. Both parents and school PTAs are likely to find these tools useful. The creators have designed excellent PowerPoint presentations that are easily adaptable for school PTAs and a checklist to design a “parent assessment” event. Separate templates are available for those states participating in PARCC or Smarter Balanced assessments, but these templates could be adapted to virtually any state. Communications quality is excellent, and utility should be very high based on the broad number and high quality of available tools. Some of the external assessment links are to commercial products. and one of those links no longer works, but overall this toolkit is excellent.