Alaska selects new contractor for assessment

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development has tentatively hired a new contractor to develop and administer assessments for Alaska’s public schools, according to a press release from the state.

Assessment and Achievement Institute of Kansas was awarded a five-year contract valued at $25 million.

The move marks a shift away from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a federally funded consortium of states that is developing assessments similar to the Common Core State Standards.

The Kansas-based contractor will provide custom assessments for grades three to 11 that are aligned to the new Alaska English language arts and mathematics standards, adopted by the state in 2012. The assessments that are given toward the end of the school year, called summative, will first be administered in spring 2015.

Tests will be computer-based, but also will be available in paper form. Consultants say computer-adaptive assessments provide more accurate scores for all students across the full range of achievement.

Here’s how it works.

Based on student responses, the computer program adjusts the difficulty of questions throughout the assessment.

For example, a student who answers a question correctly will receive a more challenging item, and an incorrect answer will generate an easier question. By adapting to the student as the assessment is taking place, these assessments present an individually tailored set of questions to each student and can quickly identify which skills students have mastered, helping teachers adjust instruction to each student’s needs.

Data Recognition Corp., the state’s assessment contractor since 2005, will administer the final year of the current Standards Based Assessments in April. The company will administer the Alaska High School Qualifying Exam through fall 2015.