Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for
College and Careers
PARCC
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Key Advances of the Common Core
MATHEMATICS
• Focus, coherence and clarity:
emphasis on key topics at each grade
level and coherent progression across
grades
• Procedural fluency and
understanding of concepts and skills
• Promote rigor through mathematical
proficiencies that foster reasoning
and understanding across discipline
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS/LITERACY
• Balance of literature and
informational texts; focus on text
complexity
• Emphasis on argument, informative/
explanatory writing, and research
• Speaking and listening skills
ANCHORED IN COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS
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What exactly is PARCC?
• a group of states working together to develop a set of assessments
that measure whether students are on track to be successful in
college and their careers
• computer-based K–12 assessments in Mathematics and English
Language Arts/Literacy
• designed to give teachers, schools, students, and parents better
information about student learning and for potential success after
high school
• first full administration during the 2014-15 school year
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Summative Assessment Components
Performance-Based Assessment (PBA)
• Administered after approximately 70% of the school year.
• ELA/literacy PBA will focus on writing effectively when analyzing text.
• Mathematics PBA will focus on applying skills, concepts, and understandings
to solve multi-step problems requiring abstract reasoning, precision,
perseverance, and strategic use of tools.
End-of-Year Assessment (EOY)
• Administered after approx. 90% of the school year.
• ELA/literacy EOY will focus on reading comprehension.
• Math EOY will be comprised of , machine-scorable items.
ELA/Literacy Item Types
Evidence-Based Selected response (EBSR) – (PBA and EOY)
• Combines a traditional selected-response question with a second selected-response
question that asks students to show evidence from the text that supports the
answer they provided to the first question.
Technology-Enhanced Constructed Response (TECR) – (PBA and EOY)
• Uses technology to capture student comprehension of texts in authentic ways that
have been difficult to score by machine for large scale assessments (e.g., drag and
drop, cut and paste, shade text, move item to show relationships).
Prose constructed Response (PCR) – (PBA Only)
• Elicits evidence that students have understood a text or texts they have read and can
communicate that understanding well in both terms of written expression and
knowledge of language and conventions. There are three of these items of varying
types on each annual performance based assessment.
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ELA/Literacy Task Types (PBA Only)
Literary Analysis Task
• Carefully consider literature worthy of close study
• Engage with text by answering a series of questions
• Compose an analytic response to a prompt
Research Simulation Task
• Analyze an information topic through several articles or multimedia
• Answer a series of questions
• Synthesize information from multiple sources to write an argumentative or
informative/explanatory response to a prompt
Narrative Task
• Write a story, detail a scientific process or write a historical account of important
figures to describe an account of event, scenes or objects (examples)
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Mathematics Task Types
Type I – (PBA and EOY)
• Balance of conceptual understanding, procedural fluency,
and application
Type II – (PBA only)
• Call for written arguments and justifications
Type III – (PBA only)
• Modeling/application in a real-world context
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Common Core Goals Reflected in PARCC Assessment
ELA/Literacy
Math
Read sufficiently complex
texts independently
Solve problems: content and
mathematical practice
Write effectively to sources
Reason mathematically
Build and present knowledge
through research
Model real-world problems
Have fluency with
mathematics
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www.parcconline.org
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