Texas Educators Become Assessment Designers to Improve Teaching and Learning  

July 18, 2025

By Joanne Jensen and Tracy Duncan 

A state assessment shouldn’t be the first time a student encounters a particular type of question or prompt. Giving students a chance to become familiar with the variety of items they are likely to see on a test can set them up for more success when it truly counts. 

That’s why the Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently partnered with WestEd to better align classroom instruction with the State of Texas Academic Assessment of Readiness (STAAR). The Region 14 Comprehensive Center and WestEd’s Assessment Design and Development team worked to ensure that classroom instruction better reflects the expectations of STAAR and encourages a stronger focus on higher order thinking skills.  

To understand the perspective of Texas teachers, WestEd first conducted more than a dozen focus groups across four core content areas. They shared examples of innovative, non-multiple-choice assessment items and gathered input about how using these items on STAAR assessments might influence teaching. Teachers emphasized that for STAAR to be fair and valid, all students must have opportunities to practice answering these types of questions in class on a computer platform resembling the one used for STAAR.  

Writing Innovative Items and Creating an Item Bank 

As a result of this feedback, WestEd designed a weeklong workshop and trained Texas educators in grades 3 through high school to write innovative test items for mathematics, reading language arts, science, and social studies. In 12 hours of live, online instruction, educators learned how to construct, for example, a “hot text” item in which students click on highlighted text to make their selection and a drag-and-drop task, which prompts students to guide text with the cursor into its correct spot. 

WestEd content specialists described the principles of Universal Design for Learning, in which teachers use multiple instructional strategies so all students can access the curriculum. They explained how to avoid introducing bias into questions and offered guidelines for writing compelling incorrect answers, or distractors, for an assessment. In content-specific groups, the teachers had an opportunity to dive deeply into the standards and begin thinking about how to assess students in new ways.  

As one participant wrote, “This helped me think through the learning standards and find different ways to test understanding.”  

With an understanding of the new item types and the fundamental aspects of item writing, participants worked to draft, review, and refine items with their peers. They did much of this writing offline and independently, but WestEd specialists held office hours to answer questions and resolve any problems that educators encountered. By the end of the week, educators had drafted a total of 675 items. 

Finally, WestEd specialists reviewed the items and selected the top 100—25 items per content area—based on a number of factors, such as the amount of editing needed and the complexity of requested art. After the items were refined and copyedited, TEA then made them available to teachers to try out in their classrooms. Students can now experience firsthand the types of items that appear on the annual assessment.  

Taking Learning Back to the Classroom 

Following the training, teachers reflected on how the experience introduced students to a testing format they’ll face in the spring. Teachers also remarked on how the training impacted their instruction more broadly. “Creating assessment questions is extremely valuable to the teaching process,” one educator wrote. “I feel my instruction will be more aligned to the way students will be assessed.”  

Students learn best when standards, curricula, instruction, and assessment are closely aligned. But it takes professional learning to create a coherent system. Indeed, the Texas educators said the workshop succeeded in promoting their state’s goal of strengthening instruction and supporting students’ higher order thinking skills.  

In all, 93 percent of elementary and middle school participants said that they were likely to change their lesson plans to reflect the new item types. As one educator commented, “I have already begun to rethink our campus’ reading strategy to help students drill down in the reading process so they will be ready for the questions.”  

How closely do standards, curricula, and assessment line up in your state? At a time when many states are revising standards and adopting new curricula, now might be the time to ask those questions.  

Joanne Jensen is a leader in the field of educational assessment with more than 35 years of large-scale assessment development experience. 

Tracy Duncan has been a social studies and English language arts content assessment specialist with WestEd since 2013. 

Learn more about how WestEd’s Assessment Design and Development team can help.