Benchmark Exams

Helping Students Master the California Content Standards

Using Data to Drive Instruction
In this world of high stakes educational accountability, it’s important to know how kids are doing all year long. The problem is that right now, there’s no easy way to assess what students know, if they are mastering standards, or if it is necessary for teachers to modify instruction before the annual, high-stakes California Standards Tests (CST).

That’s where Action Learning Systems comes in.
Action Learning Systems (ALS) has developed Benchmark Exams that measure student progress in mastering the California content standards in specific grades and subjects. Action Learning Systems Benchmark Exams are given four times a year at key instructional points and prior to the annual administration of the California Standards Tests. The Benchmark Exams provide teachers, site administrators, and school district administrators tools to correlate data to the CST and to plan for areas needing improvement. Students can also use the Benchmarks in a powerful way, as the results allow them to reflect on their learning or as preparation for high-stakes assessments such as the CST, the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), and eventually college entrance tests like the SAT and ACT.

ALS Benchmarks are available for the following content areas and grades:

Action Learning Systems Benchmark Exams: Designed to Help You Focus On Key Standards

If you were to teach all the standards required for mastery, it would require a K–22 program.1 Because students graduate after the 12th grade, ALS and a representative group of California curriculum specialists identified—by grade-level and subject—the most salient and important California content standards. We at ALS call these focus standards. The focus standards are those standards that are highly assessed on the CST, are easily linked across content areas, and serve as prerequisites to other standards.

After identifying the focus standards, ALS gathered a team of expert item writers from state testing programs such as the Golden State Exam, CAP, and CAHSEE to develop the test items for our Benchmark Exams. Once the items were written, we field-tested the Benchmark Exams with a representative sample of California students from urban areas in Southern California and rural areas in the Central Valley. Unlike other tests which may have a small sample size, the ALS Benchmark Exams were field-tested on several thousand students.

The process Action Learning Systems goes through to develop the Benchmark Exams is extensive. Each item is thoroughly analyzed and refined to ensure that items accurately reflect the students’ mastery of standards. This means that the Benchmark Exams have a 0.7 to 0.8 positive correlationto the CST. In plain English, this metric shows that 70% to 80% of the time a student who succeeded on the Benchmark Exam also succeeded on the CST.

Reporting and Analysis

Of course, if the information from the Benchmark results isn’t accessible and easy to understand, educators can’t focus their resources where they need them most. Action Learning Systems breaks down the Benchmark Exam results, giving reports with the following information for every focus standard:

• How each school within a district performed
• Overall district performance averages on the focus
  standards
• Focus standard averages per classroom, per teacher, and per school
• Results on a per student basis

With this insight into school and student performance, educators can identify patterns and trends and see immediately if students have grasped key concepts or whether further instruction is necessary.

If you purchase DataDirector™ the Benchmark Exams’ information can be coupled with district, site, or classroom data and stored in one location. By integrating the Benchmark Exams with all other data in the system, teachers and administrators can create multiple measure reports that show patterns of student performance.

1 Robert J. Marzano and John S. Kendall, “Awash in a Sea of Standards,” Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, Inc. 1998.

2 DataDirector™ is a powerful data warehouse tool that provides extensive multiple measure analyses and reports from the district to the individual student.

For more information, contact Action Learning Systems at
916-447-0762 or bwilson@actionlearningsystems.com