Common Core

We must offer students ample time for recess and brain breaks to help them to develop social competencies and to optimize attention to learning. As a result, students will be better able to perform their academic tasks.

Whether assessments administered in a district are producing useful data can be determined through establishing a comprehensive assessment plan. Assessments should support a district’s strategic plan and determine student progress according to Common Core State Standards. This web seminar, originally broadcast on February 20, 2014, featured experts in curriculum development and school improvement, who presented the best ways to develop strategic assessment plans, how to determine assessment effectiveness, and how to inform stakeholders of student progress.

A successful student-centered learning environment engages students in rigorous activities where they are able to try out their own ideas, make their own mistakes, and then learn from them. ST Math is designed to precisely deliver this type of individualized learning experience. In ST Math, every student receives real-time informative feedback on their unique choices and actions as they try to solve richly interactive puzzles using the virtual manipulative tools that are at the heart of every game.

The rigor of the Common Core requires a depth of thinking that is unfamiliar to many students. To begin teaching to these new standards, teachers must invoke different tools and methods. In this web seminar originally broadcast on June 6, 2013, administrators from Howard County (Md.) Public School System shared their phased Common Core transition plan, as well as their collection of online resources for students, teachers, and administrators.

The Common Core State Standards are going to require levels of thinking and conceptual understanding to which many students have never been measured. To prepare students for what is to come, instructional procedures need to change. This web seminar, originally broadcast on April 25, 2013, explored the benefits of introducing game-based instructional software in readying students for success with the Common Core and the next generation of assessments.

Some of the school districts adopting online Common Core assessments to measure academic achievement in 2014-2015 plan to develop their own tests.

In a survey released by Enterasys, a company specializing in wireless systems, 42 percent of schools plan to develop their own tests, while 55 percent of schools are likely to work with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

Out of the 45 states that have adopted the Common Core, only 11 states and the District of Columbia have high school math graduation requirements that align to the new standards, says a new study. Thirteen more states are only partially aligned, leaving 22 that have yet to complete any steps to meet the graduation standards, according to the study, co-sponsored by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education and the nonprofit, Change the Equation.