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EOY Acadience Testing Reminders

Published on

DATE:   
Thursday, March 24, 2022

TO: 
Elementary School Administrators

FROM:  
Carolyn Gough, Administrator of Teaching & Learning
Ben Jameson, Director of Evaluation, Research and Accountability

SUBJECT:  
EOY Acadience Testing Reminders

The end-of-year Acadience testing window opens on April 11th. With a six-day spring break and six additional days with no kindergarten students in buildings, the 2021-22 EOY window is one of the shortest testing windows on record. As we prepare for Acadience testing, there are a few friendly reminders that help the district testing teams be as efficient as possible while they are at your school testing students:

  • Avoid scheduling kindergarten and first grade classes back to back, when possible. They take longer because assessment assistants are administering both the reading and math measures.
  • Encourage your teachers to be flexible. They need to be prepared to come early or late to their allotted time.
  • Be sure to have an adult runner available who knows the school and can quickly have a teacher come to the testing area, distribute student cards, and help the testing run as efficiently as possible. If schools don’t have a runner available, a parent who knows where teacher classrooms are is a viable option. If there is no runner, one of our assessment assistants has to do it, which means she is testing less students.
  • We continue to need the assistance of instructional coaches as well as anyone else who has been trained to administer all of the Acadience Reading and Math measures on the days we are in your building. We have been unable to fill 10 district assessment assistant positions. Earlier this year, we sent department personnel to help with testing (though there are only eight of us). Testing in RISE, Utah Aspire Plus, DLM, Reading Inventory, and AAPPL for foreign language are all being administered at the same time as Acadience Reading and Math. Because of this, department personnel will not be as available to assist with Acadience testing during the EOY window.
  • We have left some time at the end of the testing window for assessment assistants to complete absent testing for any students at any of the 41 schools that were absent on the day(s) of testing. That said, there have been occasions in previous windows this year where there were 60-90 K-3 students absent on testing day(s). If there are that many absences in a school during the end-of-year window, the school will need to help test some of those absent students.

If you are interested in having your aides get trained to administer both Acadience Reading and Math tests, there are two Canvas courses available:

Please contact Ben Jameson or Shannon Johnson in Evaluation, Research & Accountability with any questions or concerns.

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