With today’s emphasis on state-level assessments, school districts are being held to ever-higher levels of accountability. Local educators need reliable and valid information to track students’ growth toward state standards and identify students who may have difficulty meeting certain levels of academic proficiency.

The item bank contains more than 11,000 high-quality items that measure reading and math skills in grades 3 through 8 and are comparable to those used in statewide tests. Student responses to these items can help identify learning strengths and weaknesses.

Item Development

Our item bank has been developed to meet the highest standards for both content and psychometric rigor. Measured Progress follows a rigorous item-development process to ensure that items are valid, reliable, and of the highest possible quality for assessing student mastery of academic content standards, including higher-order thinking skills. This process includes several key steps.

• An expert team of content specialists develops all items. Each item adheres to stringent, comprehensive development specifications.
• We conduct rigorous internal and external item reviews to ensure the accuracy of content alignment; correct key; clear, accurate, and appropriate item graphics; grade-appropriate and unambiguous language; adherence to good item-writing principles; and absence of any sensitivity or bias issues.
• Our content specialists carefully analyze state and/or district content frameworks and align items to these standards.
• We field-test all items to verify that they function appropriately for the grade and content area specified.

Item Characteristics

During the development process, a number of item characteristics are identified and used to increase the richness and validity of each item.

Mathematics Content

• Math items are based on real-life situations that are familiar to students.
• Many items assess higher-order thinking skills, such as applying mathematical concepts and answering questions posed in novel formats.
• Items use clear sentence structure and concise, grade-appropriate vocabulary.
• Various contexts—such as using puzzle-type formats to assess familiar geometric shapes—are used to ensure appropriate interest level for students.
• Multiple-choice items have appropriate distracters (i.e., incorrect selections), which are designed to capture common errors.

Reading Content

• Reading items are grouped with corresponding reading passages.
• The passages reflect a wide variety of types of fiction and non-fiction content.
• They are excerpted from published literature to keep student interest high and to reflect the variety of literature types students read.
• Passages contain information that is new and engaging to students.
• Teachers, content specialists, and bias panels carefully select and thoroughly evaluate the passages.

Delivery Options

The item bank is available via two delivery platforms. As a third option, districts can receive the item bank in XML format for use with other delivery platforms.

schoolBrains:Testing and Performance Assessment
offered with integrated professional development

schoolBrains:TPA is a powerful, highly secure, Internet-based testing and performance assessment solution that gives teachers and administrators the tools to assess, track, manage, analyze, and improve student performance.

• Easy access to current and historical assessment data
• Unique views of meaningful, easy to understand data
• Customized view of data related specifically to your district, school, class, course and students
• Allows printing of testlets for paper-and-pencil administration
• Includes scanning software for producing immediate test results

The Scantron Achievement Series

The Achievement Series employs a user-friendly module for educators to analyze the results of student responses. See a demo of this platform at www.scantron.com. This delivery option offers:

• Online testing with immediate scoring and reporting
• Offline testing, using scannable documents
• User-friendly software for item analysis
• The ability to administer district-built tests online or offline