Consortia Flesh Out Visions for Common Tests

Documents offer clues on how standards might be translated for tests

Common academic standards, adopted by nearly every state, lay out big shifts in expectations for teachers and students in mathematics and English/language arts. Now a new set of documents edges closer to offering a vision of how those standards might look in the classroom and on tests.

The documents were released this month by the two groups of states that are designing tests for the new standards. One group, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium , or SBAC, released “content maps and specifications” in English/language arts. The other, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers , or PARCC, unveiled “content frameworks” in both subjects.

Both documents serve to explicate the standards, highlighting key concepts or progressions of learning. PARCC’ s focuses on identifying the ideas that should be stressed and how they could be grouped together, and SBAC’s describes the ways students should be able to prove...