Aligned with PHS’s adaption of the Common Core State Standards, all juniors and freshmen may be participating in a field test of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

The testing schedule for Smarter Balanced field-testing and STAR testing is still being determined. While juniors and freshmen will take STAR tests and/or the English and math portion of the Smarter Balanced assessment, the implementation of the Smarter Balanced assessment will replace the STAR test for the 2014-2015 school year.

According to the California Department of Education, the purpose of the field test is to “ensure that assessment items are accessible to all students and produce results that are valid, reliable, and fair,” before the real test is administered next school year.

Assistant principal Eric Mapes said Common Core focuses on a concept known as “depth of knowledge.”

“When they look at the STAR test, they found that most questions are depth of knowledge 1 or 2, the toughest questions being 2s,” Mapes said. “[Smarter Balanced] questions are going to have more 3s, so they go much deeper and there’s not so much surface.”

While the STAR test includes primarily multiple choice questions, the Smarter Balanced Field Test will include multiple-choice, matching, fill-in tables, drag and drop, graphing, short text, and long essay components, as well as a performance task, according to the California Department of Education, and it will all be taken on computers.

“Technology wise, that’s a concern I have,” Mapes said. “Computers go down, the internet’s not working, people can’t get their username and password to work, so there’s a lot of question marks still up in the air.”

Mapes said because it is a field test and is meant to help the test developers get a baseline, neither the school nor individual students will receive the test results.

“I’m not sure how we’re going to do,” Mapes said. “I imagine anytime we do something different that’s not what we’ve been doing, there’s going to be some struggle, but from everything I’ve seen so far, we’re already doing a lot of Common Core stuff in the classroom.”

Junior Sarah Lofstrom said she is not too worried about having to take the Smarter Balanced Field Test.

“It sounds like a drag because it’s a lot more detailed,” Lofstrom said, “but it’s just another state test.”

English teacher Debbi Hill said one of the major differences between STAR and Smarter Balanced is that the latter requires students to complete a performance task. Hill has created practice performance tasks modeled after Smarter Balanced tasks to help her students prepare for the test.

“We don’t want our students to take this high stakes test and be totally floored, having had no experience with it before,” Hill said. “So we’re trying to incorporate similar types of assessments into our own curriculum in the classroom to give students a similar experience.”

Hill said she likes how the idea behind Smarter Balanced asks students to think critically and perform a writing task that will show if they have the skills they need in college and in their career.

Math teacher John Hayden said the shift to Smarter Balanced will encourage teachers to get away from the traditional lecture-based approach to teaching. Hayden said he likes how with the new testing, there is not just one right answer.

“The performance assessments are where I hope things are really going to be going because they actually look at what you did and how you did it,” Hayden said, “and what you really know, not just that you happened to select the right answer or got lucky.”

Hayden said for this field test, students should take it seriously but not stress out about it.

“Next year, it’s going to be the actual thing. I’m really glad we’re participating, and that our information is going to be used to help set the standards.”