Session 1 — Using the Smarter Balanced Interim Assessment
Presenter: Jennifer Paul (OEAA) · Day: April 23, 2026
The agenda calls this “M-STEP/Smarter Crosswalk” and schedules it at 10:30am, after growth. The minutes make it Session 1. See April 2026 TAC Agenda.
What OEAA brought
Three things: the state of voluntary adoption of the Smarter Balanced interim assessments, a draft concordance table meant to increase that adoption, and — off-agenda — a WIDA operations update.
Artifacts: April 2026 TAC Interim Deck, Smarter Balanced Interim Participation Trend Data, Interim and Smarter Concordance Table Examples.
What OEAA was actually asking
The deck reduces to one question:
What information would educators need in order to better use the scores from the interims?
Behind it sits a harder one OEAA did not put on a slide: adoption is flat, and OEAA does not know why. Usage data exists at the school level but not at the user level, so the department cannot see whether 14,000 tests represent many teachers using the system lightly or a few using it heavily.
The substance
Adoption was rebranded from “pilot” to a professional learning opportunity run with the Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC) — a deliberate move away from framing that implied provisional status. Roughly 14,000 students across 21 schools and about 10 districts. Recruitment has been webinars, presentations, and direct outreach, with incentives offered. Forest Hills and North Branch Area Schools are named as proponents.
The participation table tells a story the presentation did not: net tests fell about 2% even though Forest Hills brought six new schools in. See Smarter Balanced Interim Participation Trend Data.
MAC is running a barrier study to determine what prevents districts from using the assessment.
Full thread: Smarter Balanced Interim Adoption.
The concordance table
OEAA’s instrument for raising adoption is a table mapping Smarter Balanced interim scale scores to M-STEP scale scores by grade and performance level. The committee treated it as a communication artifact rather than a psychometric one, and its feedback was almost entirely about how a non-specialist would read it.
Full thread: M-STEP / Smarter Balanced Concordance.
What the committee advised
- Publish the concordance formula, not just the table — districts will want the formula, not just the table
- Move key takeaway and performance level to the top of the concordance document — performance-level information belongs at the top
- Build a tool that accepts a theta value — build a tool that accepts a theta value
- Ask Smarter Balanced whether interim reports can carry the M-STEP score — ask Smarter Balanced whether the interim reports themselves can carry the corresponding M-STEP score
- Consider a prediction study if participation supports it — run a prediction study if participation supports it
- Target district financial staff and school boards — target district financial staff and school boards
- Tell districts they need not wait for reimbursement — tell districts they need not wait for reimbursement
The committee also pressed on the word could in the table’s worked example, and on what “most likely score” is supposed to mean to a teacher. The exchange is short in the minutes and is the clearest instance in the meeting of a validity question arriving disguised as a copy-editing question.
WIDA update (off agenda)
Covered under this session in the minutes though it appears on no agenda item: WIDA Assessment Operations.
Open questions
How many educators are actually using the interim assessments?