The Oregon Statewide assessment system is a valid, fair, and reliable approach to student assessment that provides educators, students and parents meaningful results with actionable data to help students succeed.

Our assessment system, aligned to Common Core State Standards, consists of three major components, all designed to improve teaching and learning.

Teachers use formative assessment during instruction to gain actionable feedback that they can use to adjust their instruction and improve student learning. Learn more about the Formative Assessment Process (PDF).

To support formative assessment, the Digital Library is an online collection of high-quality instructional and professional learning resources contributed by educators for educators. These resources are aligned to college- and career-ready standards standards and help educators implement the formative assessment process to improve teaching and learning.

Optional interim assessments allow teachers to check student progress throughout the year, giving them information they can use to improve their instruction and help students meet the challenge of college- and career-ready standards. These tools are used at the discretion of schools and districts, and teachers can employ them to check students’ progress at mastering specific concepts at strategic points during the school year. The interim assessments consist of the following features:

• Interim Comprehensive Assessments (ICAs) that test the same content and report scores on the same scale as the summative assessments.
• Interim Assessment Blocks (IABs) that focus on smaller sets of related concepts and provide more detailed information for instructional purposes.
• Focused IABs that assess no more than three assessment targets to provide educators with a finer grained understanding of student learning.
• High-quality test items that are developed in the same way as those used for the summative assessments.
• Questions that can be machine scored by the Smarter Balanced Test Delivery Engine (some questions such as constructed-response items and performance tasks need to be scored by teachers locally).

Interim Assessments Overview and Blueprints

Summative assessments determine students’ progress toward college and career readiness in English language arts/literacy and math. These are given at the end of the school year and consist of two parts: a computer adaptive test and a performance task. The summative assessments:

• Accurately describe both student achievement (how much students know at the end of the year) and student growth (how much students have improved since the previous year) to inform program evaluation and school, district, and state accountability systems
• Include writing at every grade and ask students to solve multi-step, real-world problems in mathematics; and
• Capitalize on the strengths of computer adaptive testing: efficient and precise measurement with a quick turnaround of results.

More than 220 colleges and universities have agreed to use results of the high school summative assessments as evidence of student readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses.

• Learn more about the development and design of the summative assessment, including content specifications, item/task specifications, and test blueprints.

Listed below are documents that provide information related to Smarter Balanced Assessments