We’re committed to helping states and school districts design and implement assessment and accountability systems that support meaningful educational outcomes and student achievement.
We help states and school districts design assessments and assessment systems that meet technical and policy goals to support student learning and for other critical uses.
We’re a leader in designing and implementing accountability systems for states and school districts to meet key federal and state requirements that also support continuous improvement efforts.
RILS offers a unique, collaborative learning opportunity for educators and assessment professionals across the country. Hear from some of our multi-year attendees about what makes the conference so special and how it helps support better assessment and accountability practices nationwide.
It may sound innovative to claim that commercial interim assessments support instruction, but simply saying it doesn’t make it so.
Heraclitus of Ephesus said that “The only thing that is constant is change.” This observation certainly applies to K-12 assessment programs, as assessment transitions seem to be happening on a more frequent basis and at a more rapid pace in recent years.
Consider the following information gathered from a recent informal survey of 21 states by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) about assessment transitions in the past few years:
Getting the most out of any investment is common sense, and a sensical goal. In terms of school districts and states, these entities often make substantial investments into interim assessments with the aim of supporting classroom instruction and district decision making.
For a variety of reasons—political, psychometric and practical—states are often required to modify their large-scale summative assessments. These changes may be significant, such as developing new assessments after the adoption of revised academic content standards, or minor, such as adding a couple items to an existing test blueprint.
I was recently invited by Future Focused Education to share my thoughts on teacher evaluation for their blog. I contributed two posts about the insurmountable challenges of state-mandated teacher evaluation and the promise of coherent locally-based support and evaluation systems.
Alignment turns 25 this year. Happy Birthday, Alignment! Alignment burst onto the K-12 assessment landscape with the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) – the 1994 reauthorization of ESEA. Among other Title 1 requirements, IASA required states to develop “assessments aligned to challenging content and performance standards.”
States will soon publish (or have already published) the first results of their federally-mandated accountability systems.
State and district leaders are increasingly interested in implementing balanced systems of assessment, in large part to improve the instructional utility of assessment scores.
With the proliferation of large-scale state summative assessments and published results, one could say that testing has gone mainstream.
Alternative high schools serve a vital role in improving outcomes for students, particularly for those students who are most at risk.
While there isn’t a uniform definition for “alternative,” the term typically describes a school that primarily serves students who have not been successful in a traditional environment. Alternative high schools often receive students with cumulative academic deficits and take on the vital work of helping students prepare for opportunities after high school.
How Effective are Alternative High Schools?
Earlier this month, the Center for Assessment held its 15th annual colloquium, the first named in honor of Center co-founder, Brian Gong. The Brian Gong Colloquium is a two-day meeting arranged by the Center for Assessment to discuss select topics of importance in testing and accountability with recognized experts.
The 2019 meeting focused on the present and future use of learning analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in educational assessment, and highlighted topics including:
How do you select an interim assessment that will meet your specific goals and needs?
What assessment characteristics are necessary to support a particular test use, and what evidence of quality should be evaluated to determine whether that use is supported?
How do you know if educators and schools are appropriately interpreting and using assessment results?
Each June, the Center team and our partners gather with others around the country for the Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) National Conference on Student Assessment to share our work on K-12 assessment and accountability matters.
CCSSO has said about this year’s upcoming event, “the goal of the 2019 conference is to give states a forum to share the best practices, strategies, research studies, resources, and innovative methods when measuring student learning and holding districts and schools accountable for educational progress.”
September 26th – 27th, 2019
Portsmouth Harbor Events and Conference Center
100 Deer Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
