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What is the Smarter Balance Interim Assessment? What are the benefits of taking this assessment?
Interim assessments serve as a blueprint for the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments to support student learning.
Benefits include:
Familiarize students with the Smarter Balanced system of testing for the summative assessment season
Gather data to identify specific learning gaps and guide instruction
Learn more about the content and the types of questions used to measure student understanding.
View the accessibility tools embedded within each question.
Three Types of Interim Assessments
ICA
ICA
Interim Comprehensive Assessments
ICAs are designed to measure a broad set of content and provide a high-level overview of student performance in the same way as summative assessments.
ICAs serve as a helpful source of information if a student is new to the state and educational records are not available, when prioritizing the allocation of additional instructional support, and as a mid-year progress check.
IAB
IAB
Interim Assessment Blocks
IABs are assessments teachers can use throughout the school year to assess smaller bundles of content.
They are intended to provide educators and students the ability to check student performance at any given moment in time, and educators can use results to determine the next steps for instruction.
IABs assess between three and eight assessment targets. Since the IABs are more granular than the ICAs, educators can use IABs during the school year more consistently and frequently within the sequence of their curricula.
There are typically 10 to 18 questions on IABs.
FIAB
FIAB
Focused Interim Assessment Blocks
FIABs assess no more than three assessment targets to provide educators with a more detailed understanding of student learning.
There are typically 10 to 15 questions on Focused IABs.
These are designed to be completed in approximately one hour.
Implementation At Blue Ridge Academy
Blue Ridge will administer the Focused Interim Assessment Blocks (FIABs).
Hand Scoring is not needed with most of the FIABs
This is also the least time-consuming for our families and HSTs
FIABs should be similar in duration and length to the STAR tests (approximately one hour)
Once students have spent time working on the provided lessons, they will begin the FIAB cycle over again, first testing the same standards again, then moving on to other standards where the student may need additional work.
Students will move on only when mastery is demonstrated with the first set of standards.
When will the FIABs begin?
These assessments will begin the week of January 16th and will take place twice a week (Tues & Thurs) and will end on February 29th
To help us prepare, a sign-up link will be provided by your HST. Sign-ups are due by no later than the Friday of every week until the last day
Families will be notified prior to the session
What do students bring to the session?
Students will attend via Zoom and will need their school laptop with the testing browser downloaded
Students can use scratch paper
Next Steps
Next Steps
What happens once we are done with the assessments?
Your HST will provide you with the test results. The testing team will work with your HST on how to access your results.
Your HST will review the results with you to help identify learning gaps or areas to focus on.
Resources
https://smartertoolsforteachers.org/ - Educator-created lessons, activities, strategies, and professional development to help tailor instruction and boost learning.
https://portal.smarterbalanced.org/library/en/interim-assessments-overview.pdf - Interim assessment overview
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sa/sbacinterimassess.asp - Smarter Balanced interim assessments
Tags: interim assessments, resources, benefits to interim assessments, next steps
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