In the past 11 years, 15 states have tried to rebuild state summative testing so that it happens during the school year, not just once at the end of the year. The appeal is straightforward: shorter tests, faster results, and information teachers might use. What has been missing is an account of whether it works, for whom, and under what conditions. The evidence is scattered across state evaluations, pilot reports, federal waiver submissions, conference presentations, and surveys embedded in individual pilots. This paper synthesizes evidence from those state programs, as of fall 2026, to begin answering some of those questions.
This paper focuses on two types of within-year state assessments: through-year, and an approach we call “interim plus.”
In through-year assessment programs, results of multiple, within-year assessment administrations are used to produce a single summative score or determination. In an interim-plus assessment program, the state does not use within-year assessment scores to produce a single summative score or determination, but requires or incentivizes them and uses them for some measurement purpose (e.g., inform placement on end-of-year test, develop within-year growth measure connected to the state test) or to directly provide within-year reports to schools for informational purposes (e.g., provide student scale scores and associated performance levels as on the state test).
Trends across these two program types have emerged against a backdrop of much broader state engagement in state-supported interim programs, which we also catalog in this paper.
