From form design to standards alignments, analytics to psychometrics, our experts provide states and districts with comprehensive services to support assessment programs. We work as your partners as you articulate your needs. Your goals and objectives inform our recommendations and solutions as we design an assessment program that delivers the information your educators require to help all students succeed.
A test blueprint is critical to ensuring quality development of any assessment. Not only does it provide a table of contents for your assessment, but it also guarantees consistency of the test from year to year and validates the information about student progress collected on that assessment. Without this, it can be difficult to make reliable instructional decisions from your assessments. A blueprint can also be a helpful tool in planning instruction.
To create a quality test blueprint, it starts with the standards. CenterPoint staff will work collaboratively with you to clarify the purpose of your assessment, identify what you want to know about students as a result of your assessment, and determine the standards that best address your assessment requirements. Our assessment protocols will help guide the design and development of a quality blueprint that is tightly aligned to the standards. We can provide as much support as needed. Whether you’re looking for a more hands-on approach where we are developing drafts of blueprints alongside your team, or are just looking for initial guidance and ongoing reviews of your blueprint, our expertise can meet your needs.
Quality test items contribute meaning and value to assessments. What defines quality? Assessment experts look for alignment to content standards, items that are conceptually rich and accessible for all students, and items that are genuinely bias-free. The CenterPoint team has years of expertise in developing a variety of test items for a wide spectrum of purposes, ranging from standard multiple-choice to open-ended constructed response questions and performance-based tasks.
Our experts will develop item and test content for you or work collaboratively with your team. The assessments we produce will align to your requirements and standards and deliver a balance of items and item types. This ensures all test-takers have fair and equal opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills reliably.
In addition, we can work with you to identify your needs and the information you expect your assessment program to deliver. We will develop a blueprint and then advise and guide you in making decisions around test design including:
Together, we can build test content to meet your needs. At our “center point” is a focus on quality.
Assessments should include a range of item types and rigor. The specific assessment form that one student sees should mirror their neighbor’s in terms of complexity, as well as depth and breadth of the standards, as outlined in your blueprint. Without a strong forms design, you may end up having one form with all very complex items and/or passages, while another form includes all readily accessible items and/or passages. You want your assessment forms to be equal in what they measure.
We believe in the power of quality assessment and want to help you develop excellent assessments for use in your classrooms. CenterPoint can work with you to ensure the consistency and fairness of your assessment forms, which then leads to the comparability and reliability of the information you are collecting about student performance. We bring our assessment expertise to help you with anything from reviewing forms, working with you to build a design and development process, or constructing the individual assessment forms.
Alignment refers to the degree to which an assessment covers both the breadth and depth of classroom learning standards. In the best classrooms, learning standards, learning objectives, instructional strategies and assessments are all aligned and reinforce each other.
Aligned assessments then should work as tools for enhancing teaching and learning. Assessments that are aligned with college- and career-ready standards help ensure that every child is on a path to success by measuring what students should know at each grade level, and whether they are on track for the next material and for all opportunities after high school. They also provide families and teachers with timely information to identify students who may be falling behind and need extra help as well as information to identify students who are excelling and ready for more challenging work and enrichment.
Quality assessments drive the implementation of rigorous standards and promote instructional practices that strengthen student mastery of key knowledge and skills. The promise of rigorous standards and aligned quality assessments is in the ability to measure results and pinpoint what is working or where extra support is needed. In that sense, quality aligned assessments are the guarantor of the effective implementation of the standards.
CenterPoint offers comprehensive, high-quality assessment solutions that inform teaching and provide good, actionable information through reports to educators, students, and parents. These reports can let teachers know where to focus instruction, and guide conversations between educators and parents about how to keep students on the path to success. CenterPoint’s diagnostic tools provide teachers with a real-time snapshot of their students’ progress, and the accompanying reports provide clear, detailed information on specific skills that individual students have mastered, and where they may need additional support. This allows teachers to develop targeted opportunities for intervention or enrichment as appropriate for each student. We help teachers make use of the information they are receiving, and translate it into instruction that will support all students in moving ahead toward college and career readiness.
At their foundation, assessments are measurement tools that provide information about students’ knowledge and skills. The psychometric services CenterPoint offers ensure that the information provided and claims made about student abilities are valid, reliable, and fair. CenterPoint provides technical assistance to districts and states at every stage of assessment development to ensure that their custom assessment solutions provide reliable and valid information about students’ progress toward college and career readiness. Because states and districts have varying needs, this assistance is tailored to ensure that the assessment solutions implemented are meeting the specific goals established by each client in terms of content and rigor. We also provide guidance to clients on how they may structure their assessments, whether summative, interim, diagnostic or a full suite, to provide opportunities for meaningful claims of comparability to other states or districts.