Assessments

The Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR) is the state assessment and accountability measure for Illinois students enrolled in a public school district. IAR assesses progress of students in grades 3-8 in meeting the Illinois Learning Standards in English Language Arts and mathematics.

The CogAT is a measure of a student’s potential to succeed in school-related tasks. It is NOT a tool for measuring a student’s intelligence or IQ. Rather, it measures the reasoning skills that have developed during a student’s educational career, even though they have not been explicitly taught. These general cognitive skills are not specific to any content area, but are skills that are used in all areas of a student’s academic experiences. The CogAT also measures general “school skills,” such as the ability to listen, follow direction, and focus attention. The CogAt scores are measured as:

• Verbal (verbal classification, sentence completion, and verbal analogies)
• Quantitative (quantitative relations, number series, and equation building)
• Nonverbal (figure classification, figure analogies, and figure analysis)

The standardization of the CogAt was designed to provide national norms based on a sample of the entire U.S. school population. This “norm group” includes representative samples from 6,000 to 9,000 students drawn from public and private schools; from all geographic regions; from rural, suburban, and urban schools; and from schools of all sizes.

Students in grades 3 and 5 take the CogAT test.

The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) is a nationally normed, criterion referenced, multiple-choice, electronically administered and scored achievement test designed to measure growth in student learning. The MAP achievement test assesses students’ reading, language usage, and mathematics knowledge and skills.

The data generated from the fall administration of the MAP provides baseline data for teachers to use to determine students’ readiness for content and concepts in the District 30 language arts and mathematics curricula. The data gathered from the spring assessment provides teachers and parents with student growth and achievement information.

First grade students take the Primary Math test; second grade students take the Math and Reading tests; third through eighth grade students take the Math, Reading, and Language tests.

ACCESS is the English language proficiency test administrated to ELL students (K-8). Students are assessed in speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. ACCESS administration is mandated by the state.