arizona academic standards assessment

arizona academic standards assessment

An In-depth Analysis of the Arizona Academic Standards Assessment

1. Introduction to the Arizona Academic Standards Assessment

The Arizona Academic Standards Assessment is used to determine whether students in the state of Arizona are meeting state educational standards and whether schools within the state are meeting the required federal mandate for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The Arizona Department of Education produces an annual report that provides results and data about the assessment for the state of Arizona. A new version of the test was introduced in 2004 called the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS).

The purpose of the new test is to determine whether students know the concepts and skills identified in Arizona’s academic standards and the ADE and US social studies academic standards. The results of the test show the state whether students are meeting Arizona’s education standards (AIMS-ADE) and Arizona and United States history, or are making progress towards the goal of becoming proficient by the year (AIMS-USSS) and mastering the concepts upon high school graduation. Each year students enrolled in or above the third grade during the testing window are required to take the appropriate AIMS test.

2. Development and Implementation of the Assessment

The Race to the Top grant enabled the Arizona Department of Education to move forward with the creation of its new student data system, improving service delivery and communications with key stakeholders. Through the cooperative efforts of the Arizona Department of Administration (ADOA) and the Arizona Strategic Enterprise Technology office (ASET), the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) is in the process of implementing a unique student identifier. This compatible student ID will identify a student in over 4000 points of entry in the A+ School information system. Simultaneously, with the creation of the longitudinal student data system, efforts have been made to secure resources to address data quality. The funding was able to procure a longitudinal data system, where data could be married from year to year. As the state begins to streamline data systems, issues of data quality and matched IDs need to be simplified.

With grant resources, the department provided the support and infrastructure for thousands of Arizona teachers to ensure improvements to the assessment process. For the first time, a 12th grade component was included in Arizona’s statewide assessment system. This component will be a transition to the student performance in 11th grade on the 2014 administration of the 12th grade assessment. Throughout the design of the college and career readiness examination, K-16 educators and administrators were represented on work groups, focus groups and items selection and review committees. This process, authentic partnership with stakeholders, is paramount to Arizona’s future vision for public education. It is that shared vision that gives rise to the Arizona College and Career Readiness Assessment.

3. Impact and Effectiveness of the Assessment

In addition to determining the degree to which students actually meet specific academic standards, different audiences use assessment data for different purposes. The primary audiences of the Arizona Academic Standards Snapshot are students, parents, teachers, school and district administrators, Governing Board members, the general public, and state policymakers. The tool provides useful information to all of these groups to support different initiatives. The assessment is also specifically designed to ensure that the end product is useful, usable and used. To do this, the tool includes feedback loops from a broad spectrum of stakeholders from the beginning to the end of the project. A different tool could focus the same data entirely differently, collect different data, or serve only a specific audience.

Some audiences are not traditional recipients of the form of the state-mandated assessment. The tool has different audiences including those external to the internal user of the assessment. Other audiences include the teachers and school and district administrators who receive timely, high-grade, accurate data and their reactions to it. The tool is also used to support education reform measures and drive funding allocation decisions. Data determines policy development and builds public awareness of the role of the state in ensuring an educated youth. With the exception of students who are directly tested and have typically been the subject of numerous assessments already and regularly receive feedback on their academic progress in every type of academic achievement area, students are included in the Snapshot in every other category. However, Snapshot results are not used to evaluate individual students or teachers; rather, they are to examine and learn from the system through multiple lenses. The results are meant to inform and set policy.

4. Challenges and Future Directions

This chapter will consider several difficulties as well as provide some guidance for moving forward. The results indicated that sometimes it was difficult to match curriculum with the items of the Arizona Academic Standards test. Several factors contribute to the difficulty of not matching the curriculum with the test items. Even when a test item appears to align with a tested standard, there are still countless ways in which any given concept can be tested.

In an ever-changing society, it is challenging to maintain currency with needed skills, knowledge, and professional methods, supporting appropriate human resources professional development or alignment of resources that support student learning. But our dynamic society requires continuous sensitivity to and responsiveness for the development of our most valuable resource, human capital. Ongoing attention to the development, implementation, and application of research-based instructional methods is necessary to improve and expand options and to assure receptivity to change and innovation that meet the Arizona academic standards.

In order to meet constantly changing society’s challenges, there must be continuous and coordinated attention on frequent analyses of state content expectations in relation to rigorous student achievement standards. Dialogue, collaboration, and consensus are needed between educators and the community at large to set high expectations for student proficiency and to communicate how aligned instruction may be used to accomplish success. Appropriate evaluations of student knowledge, educational assessments, and the systems of accountability and the resources education, including adequate and reasonable funding, must be aligned to assure access, fairness, validity, usefulness, and reliability of accountability and the accomplishment of state and local education goals.