Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: Elementary School (K-5)

Kindergarten Entry Assessments: An Examination of Best Practices, National Trends, and Recommendations

States and districts use Kindergarten entry assessments (KEA) as evaluative tools for understanding students’ learning along developmental domains. Data from KEAs are informative for guiding instruction and responses based on students’ learning trajectories. While KEAs can be valuable instructional tools, it is critical to choose high-quality tools that are aligned to standards and learning objectives, […]

Key Elements of a Coherent and Equitable Local Assessment System

State assessments play an important role in monitoring how well schools and districts serve the needs of all learners. However, they are designed to provide comparable information across a state’s schools and districts, not instructional information at the classroom level or guidance about individual students’ learning. This brief is for state and local leaders who […]

Components of a Coherent and Equitable Assessment System

Assessment data have different purposes and uses depending on the interest holders who use the information they generate and whether they are geared toward the classroom, school or district, or at the state level. This handout identifies the key purposes of different assessment types within a coherent and equitable assessment system.

A First Look at Early Literacy Performance in Massachusetts

Massachusetts commissioned WestEd to conduct a study of the state’s K-3 student reading skills. WestEd’s report, authored by Mariann Lemke, Dan Murphy, Aaron Soo Ping Chow, Hayley Spencer, and Angela Zhang, provides insights into indicators of Massachusetts students showing early signs of reading difficulties. WestEd researchers examined literacy screening assessment data collected by districts and […]

English Learner (EL) Pre-Referral Flow Chart Questions

This decision-making flow chart includes target questions that Child Study teams or MTSS teams should address when working through the pre-referral decision-making process. Each school or district may modify these questions to reflect their own policies and procedures, but the outline of this flow chart provides some key decision points that should be considered when […]

A Community Engaged Framing: Building Successful Community Engagement for Schools and Families of Bilingual Students Through Inquiry

Senior Program Associate Julie Webb was part of a research team exploring ways to nurture family-school partnerships in service of student learning. This article summarizes the team’s work on developing and testing a framework for schools to utilize in their family engagement efforts, particularly with bilingual families. The framework outlines user-friendly guidance and tools for […]