The Assess2Know Benchmark Item Bank helps districts create effective, cost efficient formative assessment programs. Riverside's Assess2Know Benchmark item bank allows educators to monitor school and district performance while working toward their accountability requirements. Developed by expert content development specialists, the high quality Assess2Know Benchmark item bank is available in DataDirector™ and the Edusoft™ Assessment Management System, as well as by export file for use in other assessment and data management systems. Assess2Know Benchmark items can also be used in fixed forms for online or paper/pencil administration.
The Assess2Know Benchmark item bank offers educators the ability to create formative assessment programs that follow their district pacing guide, while being able to assess student mastery of the state, national, and Common Core State (CCSS) standards. The Assess2Know Benchmark item bank contains items for grades 2—11* in English language arts/literacy/reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, and includes multiple choice and constructed response formats as well as writing prompts.
As commissioned works by professionals and well-known authors, Assess2Know Benchmark passages are carefully reviewed to ensure sources, appropriate prior knowledge requirements, student interest, appropriateness, gender and ethnic balance, healthful habits, safety practices, and to avoid stereotyping, negative or sensitive material, obsolete content, regional bias, and unfair advantage.
In addition, all reading passages in the Assess2Know item bank is certified with a Lexile® text measure and a Flesch-Kincaid reading level. By offering both of these measures of readability, Riverside helps ensure that reading passages are grade-level and reading-level appropriate.
For reading content, the Assess2Know benchmark item bank contains an average of ten items linked to each passage. Multiple standards are covered throughout each passage and item set. Passages within each grade level cover multiple genres, themes, interests, and cultural representation.
High Quality Item and Test Development
Riverside believes that no item can be developed until the state or national assessment program is understood. Riverside alignment process requires that items reflect the intent of the standard, sample, and released items, the cognitive expectation, and other state/national test and item specifications. To accomplish this, the Riverside content development team conducts a thorough and detailed review of state and national standards, sample assessments, performance descriptors, blueprints, test and item specifications, toolkits, and instructional materials.
The Assess2Know Benchmark items have been individually hand-aligned to state and national standards to ensure item quality and alignment accuracy. Riverside maintains the quality of its items and tests through a rigorous and continuous improvement process.
An item blueprint containing the number of multiple-choice and prompt-based item types existing for each standard/ indicator is available for: English language arts/literacy/ reading, mathematics, social studies, and science. All items are assigned a Cognitive Difficulty Level and Bloom's Taxonomy Level to provide districts with information to build assessments that incorporate a range of cognitive demand.
In addition to considerations given to test form construction, the item development process requires careful scrutiny. Items written for Riverside assessments must possess the following characteristics:
- Clearly and simply written; avoid trick questions that require students to figure out a particular angle or hidden agenda on the part of the item writer
- Contain vocabulary appropriate for the grade level being tested
- Function independently; the answer to one item is not required as a condition for answering subsequent items
- Do not provide information that may be used to answer other items
- State things in the positive whenever possible
- Use accurate, high quality maps, graphs, and pictures
- Free of bias and sensitivity issues
- Avoid information that is subject to change in a short period of time
- Require students to read the passage in order to answer the question (for reading tests)
- Interesting and engaging to students
- Do not use "all of the above" or "none of the above" as answer options
- Present answer options in a logical order (e.g., numerical, alphabetical, sequential) whenever possible; options should be parallel in structure and length
Each item in the Assess2Know Benchmark item bank is assigned a Bloom's Taxonomy Level and a Cognitive Difficulty Level based on the cognitive demands required to answer the item correctly. Difficulty levels are assigned based on the following classifications:
COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY OF ITEMS
| Level 1 | Essential Skills: recall of information such as fact, definition, term, or simple one-step procedure. | |
| Level 2 | Conceptual Understanding: includes the engagement of some cognitive processing beyond recalling or reproducing a response. A conceptual understanding item requires students to make some decisions as to how to approach the problem or activity and may imply more than a single step. | |
| Level 3 | Extended Reasoning: requires problem solving, planning, and/or using evidence. Items require students to develop a strategy to connect and relate ideas in order to solve the problem while using multiple steps and drawing upon a variety of skills. |
The Assess2Know Benchmark item bank can be used throughout the year to build high quality benchmark assessments in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, which provide reliable assessment results to assist in monitoring progress for accountability requirements.
Creating an assessment that yields reliable data and has evidence of validity to support the intended inferences requires that developers carefully evaluate test materials so that students find them relevant, interesting, and engaging, but not offensive, troubling, or distracting. In an effort to achieve this delicate balance, Riverside analyzes the following key elements when developing every item and passage:
- Bias and sensitivity
- Representational fairness
- Language usage
- Stereotyping
- Controversial or emotionally charged subject matter
- Historical context
The Assess2Know Benchmark item bank is available in DataDirector™ and the Edusoft™ Assessment Management System, as well as by export file for use in other assessment and data management systems. Assess2Know items can also be used in fixed forms for online or paper/pencil administration
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