Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum & Assessment
At WestEd, success for every learner is our main goal and our tailored solutions provide greater visibility into learning and achievement at the student, classroom, school, district, and state levels.
With more than 30 years of expertise in this area of our work, we help educators and administrators understand how high-quality assessments are designed, developed, scored, and how to best use the results.
As new methods and formats for assessment continually emerge, our team collaborates with industry partners to ensure today’s curriculum and assessment solutions are high-quality, accurate, reliable, and valid.
Our team can work with you to address one or all of the following components of designing comprehensive assessment solutions:
Assessment
Framework
Develop content specifications, test blueprints, test designs, and score reports; create test content; conduct field tests and item analyses; and produce final forms.
Performance-Level
Descriptors
Craft performance level descriptors that support the standard setting process while helping educators understand student performance relative to content, standard, and grade indicators.
Score Report
Design
Design report formats that translate data into actionable insights at all levels of the education ecosystem.
Item
Development
Define objectives and facilitate item writing and review to ensure items are fair and measure what students know and can do.
Item Analysis
& Scaling
Conduct item analysis and scaling to produce results and reports that are valid and reliable.
Standard
Setting
Design and implement standard setting methods to help establish meaningful performance levels for teachers and students.
Alignment
Studies
Conduct alignment studies to evaluate how accurately assessments address the depth and breadth of content standards.
K–2 Assessment Systems Enable Early Intervention to Foster Student Success
Across the United States, statewide assessments in English language arts and mathematics are federally mandated each school year in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Missing nationwide, however, is any systematic state-level attempt to evaluate students’ ongoing progress in grades K–2, the grades that lay the foundation for all later learning.
Download a paper that presents research and explores best practices to help districts and schools effectively build K–2 assessment systems that support academic success for their youngest students.