What Students Should Know
The Illinois State Board of Education has adopted new academic standards for K-12 education to prepare Illinois students for success in college and the workforce in a competitive global economy. The new Illinois Learning Standards incorporate the Common Core State Standards developed in cooperation with 47 other states. Starting in fall 2014, students will take new tests to measure achievement of the more rigorous standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics.
The Common Core Standards link below takes you to information about the new standards and an interactive version of the new standards, which are now being implemented statewide. Other links provide information about the Illinois Learning Standards and assessments that will continue through spring 2014.
Assessment Frameworks
identify those elements of the Illinois Learning Standards that appear on the state ISAT and PSAE tests. The Frameworks assist educators, parents and students by identifying the specific kinds of information tested in Reading, Mathematics, Science, and Writing. The Frameworks offer guidance to teachers for aligning instruction to the Frameworks and Learning Standards. The Frameworks for grades 3-8 for Reading and Mathematics also report the number of test questions on each Learning Standard. This information is reported in summary form for grade 11. IIRC posts the Frameworks for Social Science, although that subject is no longer tested.
Illinois Learning Standards
(ILS) define broadly what all students in all Illinois public schools should know and be able to do in the seven core areas as a result of their elementary and secondary schooling. The Illinois Learning Standards have not changed substantively since their adoption in 1997, but minor revisions were made in 2004 to meet concerns of teachers. Note that all five subject areas have been retained for your use in teaching to standards for all subjects, even though only reading, mathematics, writing and science are currently tested. For each subject, IIRC links the Learning Standards to classroom assessments that facilitate formative evaluation of student progress, with illustrative examples of student work. When you go to the ILS link, click on the pull-down box in the upper left of the screen to navigate to any grade and subject you want to see.
Performance Descriptors
Go here to see how performance levels are defined. Performance definitions are concrete statements describing what students need to know and be able to do to at each performance level - exceeds standards, meets standards, below standards, or academic warning. The definitions are available for all subjects and grade levels for ISAT and PSAE assessments. Scale score ranges show you how performance levels are calculated. Student-friendly scoring rubrics on extended response items on ISAT reading and mathematics help teachers and students focus on explanatory skills.
Classroom Assessments
Over 900 classroom assessments with scoring rubrics that measure students' progress toward the Learning Standards have been developed by Illinois educators. All assessments are linked directly to standards and to performance descriptors. These materials also contain sample student work to illustrate how work is evaluated on the four performance levels.
Content Strands
are subsets of test items from ISAT tests that are aligned to the Learning Standards and broken out separately to assess student learning in fundamental subareas within each Standard . For example, vocabulary skills and comprehension in reading, or algebra and geometry in mathematics. The strands allow teachers to evaluate students' grasp of the developmental building blocks of learning. Click the CS link to see the strands and number of test items on each for each subject: reading (4 strands), math (5 strands), and science (5 strands). To see how students in a given school or district performed on the content strands, go to the ISAT results page for that school or district and click on "Content Strands" in the Test Results bar. IIRC also reports content strand results at the individual student level in the student reports available to educators in their school data (secure access required).
In the Classroom provides an array of resources for application in instruction, including Item Analysis Summaries, the library of Standards Aligned Classroom (SAC) lesson plans developed by teachers on past SAC teams, and links to classroom assessments,and sample test items for ISAT and PSAE.
For more information, visit these resources at the Illinois State Board of Education website: