My EWA colleague Mikhail Zinshteyn has a fine write-up over at EdMedia Commons on a new report digging deeper into plans by consortia of states to use the same assessments to measure the effectiveness and impact of the Common Core State Standards.

Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz also has a solid overview, which you can read here.

The report, published Wednesday, comes from the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at University of California, Los Angeles. Among the highlights: the bar is definitely going to be raised for student learning, and the new assessments will focus more on measuring higher-order thinking than the prior state tests.

I’ve written recently about why Common Core will be one of the big education stories of 2013, and I’ve also looked at the confusion over what the new requirements for what students will read in class. EWA also hosted a seminar in Los Angeles to discuss what the Common Core will mean for English-language learners, teachers and tests.

And while we’re on the topic of EWA seminars, we have a few travel scholarships still available for qualified journalists who want to learn more about STEM education next month at the University of Maryland. Click here for the details.