Process for ensuring High Quality Assessments: 

Designing high quality assessments is collaborative work done within the confines of the professional learning community.  A modest time-frame set aside each week allows educators within the social studies area to collaborate consistently within the framework of curriculum. The process of the PLC environment is one that works to adjust assessment designs with the needs of the students.  The process of ensuring that our designs are of high quality come from a deep and continuous vetting of the assessments.  

The revision process of our assessments focuses on the reliability and validity of those designs.  To meet the goals of our test reliability, the language, directions, and prompts must be clear and understandable.  The results of this reliability testing comes from feedback by students and colleagues.  The process for testing validity comes from curricular work within content areas.  Educators, with agreed upon assessments, utilize common rubrics to score tests in the inter-reader context to set proficiency goals and adjust test design.  Data gathering concepts will be used to test reliability of those designs once again after each validity meeting we have.

To ensure all goals are at a high and achievable level, we create a set of content goals and protocols.  The specificity of these protocols allows educators to give clear and precise guidelines for assessment concepts such as time structure, revisions allowed, credibility of sources, proficiency scales, and expectations for historical thinking.  The protocols utilize the foundation of district goals and construct specific guidelines that reflect the intentions of the social studies curriculum.  While the intentions of the content area focus on formative and interim processes within the classroom, the content recognizes the desire for growth in all summative assessments.  The framework utilizes a common design for our interim assessments so that educator autonomy can flourish within the formative functions and render growth in summative results.  The development of high level historical thinking as well as growth in reading and writing apply to the evolution of both college and career ready students.

Implementation

The implementation of the curriculum is the closing mark on a perpetual revision process.  Assessments are invoked once they are deemed reliable and valid, with the thought of continuous revision in mind.  A strong and compelling assessment gives clear and precise prompts and expectations, which allows for all stakeholders to recognize the high level benchmarks expected for that assessment. These assessments enable students to access learned content into the higher level context of historical thinking.  The educator analysis of the assessment designs comes from growth within historical thinking and literary skills, spurning data and observations for use in PLC meetings.  The entirety of the assessment process allows for both student and educator growth in the design and quality of the intended outcomes of the social studies curriculum.

Complexity and Rigor

The program that we have used consistently for professional development in the district over complexity and rigor has been through Karin Hess.  The depth of knowledge content and one-on-one development have helped us in our assessment design process.  This process fits in with our prioritization and bundling process as we work through our assessments as well.  The resources most used within our department and PLC work are provided below.