Model Cornerstone Assessment Pilot

MCA Pilot & Benchmarking Process

From July 2014 through December of 2015, and again from January 2016 through December of 2016, thanks in part to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the partner organizations of the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards piloted Model Cornerstone Assessment (MCA) tasks aligned to the newly released national core arts standards in order to collect and benchmark examples of student work.

The arts were the first among the core academic subjects to embed model assessments within the package of resources offered with the publication of national standards. Model Cornerstone Assessments are designed to be teacher friendly units of study and sample assessments relevant to student learning which can yield proof of student achievement. The goal of piloting these embedded assessments was three fold:

- to create and test a set of protocols for benchmarking student work

- to provide a rich source of professional development for the educators directly involved in the project

- to generate field tested curriculum and assessment units along with student work in order to illustrate the standards in action at grade levels 2, 5 and 8 and three levels of proficiency in High School

The teams used a tested process of scoring the student work, designed to produce inter-rater reliability. The result was a data bank of student artwork as evidence of what standards based learning in the arts looks and sounds like available to all and housed on the national arts standards website at www.nationalartsstanards.org

BENCHMARKING PROCESS PROTOCOLS

Emerging from the pilot was a set of protocols for assessing student work in the arts. A step by step process which includes:

1. teaching to pre-established model cornerstone assessments; units of suggested instruction aligned to standards with embedded assessment models created by and for arts educators

2. creating online communities of learners to support teachers, establish sharing and communications and meet needs for professional development

3. collecting student work scored by the teachers as meeting standard from diverse classrooms across the nation through a process of online uploading to secure sites

4. forming small teams of five educators for each discipline as benchmarkers who would be asked to visit the uploaded student work and re-score

5. convening the benchmarking teams face to face to review work for which they could not reach consensus in order to finalize the adjudicating process, increase inter-rater reliability and produce benchmarked samples of student work aligned with model cornerstone assessments and national core arts standards at grades 2, 5 and 8 and three levels of High School

WHAT IS AN MCA?

An MCA, or Model Cornerstone Assessment, is a unit of instruction with embedded assessment that represents important learning in a discipline. The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards adopted the MCA concept from the work of Jay McTighe (2011) who consulted to the writing of the arts standards. Go here to learn more about the MCA's, or download and view the PowerPoint presentation below.

Understanding MCA's.pptx

WHAT IS BENCHMARKING?

This brief video below explains the process of benchmarking; or adjudicating student work with groups of teachers in order to come to a shared understanding and agreement on student work that demonstrates proficiency and learning at standard.