It's State Assessment Time!
Beginning March 9, Kansas students in grades 3 - 8 and 10 will take state assessments in math and English language arts. As you will recall, these new assessments, which your student piloted last year, are aligned to the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards and will be administered on the computer. Students in grades 6, 8, and 11 will take a History/Government assessment and students in grades 4, 7, and 11 will
take a science assessment. This letter is intended to provide you with a brief explanation of the assessments and the results.
The new assessments include technology enhanced features such as “drag and drop” and highlighting text to provide a more engaging opportunity for your student to demonstrate understanding of the subject matter. Performance tasks are a new feature of the assessments this year.
New reports will be developed to identify where your student is doing well and where additional focus is needed. With that being said, any time a new state assessment is introduced, it requires a comprehensive analysis of performance results to determine what exactly the scores mean. In order to complete this analysis, we anticipate that assessment results will be made available in September. Receiving the results later, rather than nearly immediately as we’ve done in the past several years, will be a change for everyone—students, teachers and parents.
The new assessments were developed by the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation (CETE) located at the University of Kansas. CETE has created a practice site for anyone wanting to take a closer look at the new assessments. I encourage you to take a few minutes to review the practice items to get a better idea of what your student will experience. The practice assessments are available at: http://ksassessments.org/practice-tests.
Thank you for your continued support of Kansas education and for being THE most important person in the education of your student.
Kansas Commissioner of Education