Core Task Project

In the video linked here, David Pearson, former dean of the Graduate School of Education at University California, Berkeley, moves viewers through the coming PARCC and SBAC assessments and the implications for instruction.

At minute 5:47, he begins an overview of American assessment history and is able to pinpoint when education began to teach and assess skills in isolation. Later at minute 6:29 we learn how commercial materials started the “quiet consolidation of skill based learning” and at 12:37, Pearson shares that one of the consequences of NCLB was that instruction began to look like the assessment. (Click on image for larger view.)

This groundwork in assessment history then leads to Pearson describing what he favors about SBAC and PARCC and why he thinks they are good tests. He finishes with these important conclusions:

“Students who have learned how to read and write in curriculum that requires constructed responses and real writing will perform well on PARRC and SBAC assessments. They will have developed some transferrable practices that will serve them well in these new circumstances.”  (23:40)

conversely

“Students still wallowing in a bits and pieces curriculum will not do well on PARCC and Smarter Balanced. There’s just no way I think it can happen.” (23:57)