Testing Time
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STAAR
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STAAR Alternate 2
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TELPAS
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TELPAS Alternate
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To assist district and campus testing coordinators in accessing information in these Coordinator Resources on mobile devices, the home page has been redesigned to include icons and links for all major sections.
Reporting
To assist educators, parents, students, and other stakeholders in understanding the various reports and reporting events for the Texas Assessment Program, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is implementing a maximum allowable testing time of seven hours for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) and Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS) assessments. Students are expected to complete each STAAR and TELPAS assessment in about three hours; students who are still testing after four hours should be consolidated into a general testing area to continue testing. Students must complete the assessment within the same school day, and no test session may exceed seven hours. Exceptions exist for eligible students who have an approved Extra Day designated support. In addition, as with the administration of STAAR, the TELPAS listening and speaking assessment should be administered on a different day than the TELPAS reading and writing assessment to reduce student fatigue and allow students sufficient time and opportunity to do their best work.
Holy Days and Religious Observance
House Bill (HB) 1883, 88th Texas Legislature, Regular Session, 2023, added Section 39.0238 to the Texas Education Code (TEC), allowing local education agencies (LEAs) to consider the dates of religious holy days or periods of observance likely to be observed by students in the LEA when establishing the LEA’s school calendar and the days on which students will be administered state assessments. Religious holy days and periods of observance are defined as days observed by a religion whose places of worship would be exempt from property taxation under Texas Tax Code Section 11.20. The law requires LEAs to provide an alternate test date within the testing window to administer an assessment to a student who is absent from school to observe a holy day or period of observance on the day a STAAR or STAAR Alternate 2 assessment is administered. When providing the required make-up testing day, LEAs must maintain the security of the assessment to ensure that the assessment content remains valid throughout the testing window.
Reporting
To assist educators in understanding the various reporting events and the types of reports produced for the Texas Assessment Program, a new Reporting section has been added to these Coordinator Resources. The Reporting section includes information on accessing assessment results in the Centralized Reporting System (CRS) and the Family Portal and interpreting assessment reports. In addition, TEA has made the following changes to the assessment reports provided for the Texas Assessment Program based on input from educators:
Printed copies of student report cards and confidential student labels will be shipped to districts after final results are available. Only electronic copies will be available with preliminary results.
District personnel must opt in to receive printed copies of student report cards and confidential student labels.
Districts will receive district and campus summary reports with both preliminary and final results. Roster reports will be provided with final results.
Item analysis reports will no longer be provided. Districts can access item analysis reports in CRS.
has made the following enhancements based on input received:
An easy to use, color-coded PDF that lists reporting deliverables, their purposes, and their delivery dates is available to download, print, and share. The one-page (front and back) document is available in the Reporting section of these Coordinator Resources and on the Student Assessment Results webpage.
Additional information for extended constructed responses is being included in reporting data files that are sent to local education agencies (LEAs). Non-scorable condition codes and a glossary explaining them will be available. Points earned for each of the two sections of the writing rubric—Development and Organization of Ideas and Conventions—will be provided.
Early student-level results, available in the Centralized Reporting System (CRS) and in data files, are provided for student-level decisions and allow LEAs an opportunity to analyze the results ahead of the scheduled correction window. As such, early student-level results will no longer include statewide aggregate results. Statewide aggregate results will be available with the preliminary assessment results for accountability provided about a week after the early results.
Within CRS, in a new Item Analysis Report task, authorized educators will be able to see the points each student earned for the question and the student expectation the question is assessing.
Test questions for the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS) will be released after the spring 2025 administration, and educators will be able to listen to students’ speaking responses in CRS. In addition, parents will be able see all TELPAS test questions and their child’s responses, including responses to listening questions, in the Family Portal.
The Research Portal has increased functionality that includes use of County-District-Campus numbers and viewing combined data from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) English and Spanish administrations.
The Family Portal includes accessibility tools to assist parents and guardians in accessing their child’s state assessment results. Accessibility tools for the Family Portal include zoom, color contrast, highlighting, and masking.
Maintaining Score Code Documentation
To assist LEA and agency staff in the event that an LEA undergoes a data-related compliance review, district testing personnel are required to indicate in the Test Information Distribution Engine (TIDE) a reason (e.g, ill, testing incident) for marking a student’s test with a score code of “O” for “Other,” “A” for “Absent,” “M” for “Medical Exception,” or “N” for “No Authentic Academic Response.” District personnel should maintain local documentation when entering one of these score codes for a student’s test. Documentation may vary depending on the specific reason and score code assigned.
Test Information Distribution Engine
Based on input from educators, the Test Information Distribution Engine (TIDE) has TIDE has been updated to include several enhancements. Refer to the TIDE Enhancements What’s New for the 2023–2024 2024–2025 School Year training module in the Learning Management System (LMS) for more information. The following changes have been made to TIDE:
The View Student History feature allows district coordinators, district testing assistants, and campus testing coordinators to view what updates were made to a student’s demographic or registration information in TIDE and when the updates were made during the current school year. Users will also be able to view assigned rosters and eligible assessments using this feature.
Students who have the STAAR 3–8 Above Grade field marked in TIDE will be removed from their grade-level assessment in the corresponding content area. These students will see only the above grade-level assessment in the Test Delivery System (TDS).
The secure inbox has been renamed as the Secure File Center. The Secure File Center serves as a password-protected repository listing files containing data that have been exported from TIDE and other Cambium Assessment, Inc. (CAI) systems. After search results are exported to the Secure File Center, TIDE sends an email notification that the export task is completed and the file is available in the Secure File Center for download.
The Add Student page in TIDE has the following new fields:
EOC—Previously Passed: This field indicates whether a student has previously passed a specific STAAR end-of-course (EOC) assessment. This field will be updated by CAI after December, spring, and June results are released.
Proctored Administration: This field is used to indicate which students require an individual or small group signed administration, ensuring that all students within a group see the same set of items.
STAAR Paper Test Format: This field has two new options that allow district testing personnel to order and receive both braille and embedded support materials during the initial order window.
Spell Check: This accommodation was previously called Spelling Assistance.
Test Delivery System
The following updates have been made to TDS:
Students will see an “Are you still there?” pop-up window after five minutes of inactivity and will be logged out of an assessment after 20 minutes.
Students are now able to modify font colors and background colors while testing. Using this option is no longer limited to the Test Settings screen.
Students who have an accommodation for text-to-speech (TTS) will now see a Read Aloud button on the directions screens in TDS.
Students who have an accommodation for speech-to-text (STT) can now use STT in the Notepad and Sticky Notes tools.
Coordinator Resources Updates
In addition to the new Reporting section, these Coordinator Resources include a new section on Other Testing Scenarios that includes information on out-of-school (OOS) and out‑of‑district (OOD) administrations, student mobility, and assessments in alternative education settings.
Several sections of these Coordinator Resources now also include a district coordinator checklist and a campus coordinator checklist. Testing coordinators can use these to ensure that they have completed all their tasks for Registration, Training Activities, Online Administrations, Paper Administrations, Holistic Administrations, Completing Administrations, and Other Testing Scenarios.
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To assist district testing personnel in accounting for all students, specifically those students testing online, a Test Progress Summary task has been added to the Monitoring Test Progress tab in TIDE. This task provides visual representations and detailed information of the number and percentage of students who have started or completed an assessment online based on the Test Completion Rates report.
For LEAs that track students in TIDE using rosters, new functionality has been added to create non-reporting rosters. Rosters were originally available in TIDE to create groups of students only for reporting purposes. However, new non-reporting rosters can be used to create groups of students for printing ancillary testing materials such as student test tickets.
The Secure File Center has an updated interface and added features to enhance usability. District personnel can now select and download multiple files at once and share them with up to 25 users at a time through the Email option.
Test Delivery System
To assist students with taking online assessments, the following updates have been made to the Student Interface of the Test Delivery System (TDS):
Students will now see improved pop-up message boxes with icons and text-to speech (TTS) functionality to aid in student understanding. TTS availability in message boxes is based on a student’s test setting.
Students who use TTS will see a new feature in which the entire line of text will be highlighted in addition to the word being spoken.
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Paper by Request
HB 1225, 88th Texas Legislature, Regular Session, 2023, added Section 39.02342 to the TEC, allowing an LEA to provide a paper administration of a STAAR assessment to any student whose parent, guardian, or teacher in the applicable subject area requests a paper version.
The number of students who are provided a paper by request administration of STAAR may not exceed three percent of the number of eligible students enrolled in the district who are administered each assessment. It is important to note that the number of students who receive a paper by request administration is separate and distinct from the students who are eligible for a special paper administration of STAAR. LEAs will continue the same process as last year for any student who is eligible for a special paper administration of STAAR because the student needs a testing accommodation that is not possible to provide in an online setting. These students are not counted in the maximum three percent of students who are administered a paper by request administration of STAAR. Refer to the Paper by Request Administration page for more information.
Word Prediction (Co:Writer) Embedded Accommodation
For students who have a word prediction accommodation for STAAR, TDS now has a Word Prediction (Co:Writer) feature embedded.
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Participation Requirements
As a result of the U.S. Department of Education’s denial of Texas’s waiver request for the statewide limitation on the number of students who are assessed with STAAR Alternate 2, TEA has updated the STAAR Alternate 2 participation requirements for the 2023–2024 school year.
The admission, review, and dismissal (ARD) committee must review and determine student participation in STAAR or STAAR Alternate 2 for each school year. If the ARD committee has already reviewed and determined student participation for the 2023–2024 school year based on the previous participation requirements, district personnel must review all eligible students to determine if any STAAR Alternate 2 participation decisions need to be reevaluated based on the updated participation requirements. For those students whose participation needs to be reevaluated based on the updated requirements, assessment participation determinations may be made through an ARD amendment (in accordance with the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 34, §300.324(a)(i)) or a full ARD committee meeting. For any future assessment participation decisions, the ARD committee should use the updated STAAR Alternate 2 participation requirementsBased on feedback from educators, parents, and students, TEA is implementing a new policy for consolidating students who are still testing after a certain point. Students who are not testing or who have completed testing should be participating in a regular or alternate class schedule in which enrichment activities (e.g., instruction beyond the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills [TEKS]) are being shared. Students who are still testing after about four hours should be consolidated to continue testing. District testing coordinators must ensure that each campus administering STAAR or TELPAS has a plan in place to consolidate students who are still testing after a certain point. Campus plans may vary based on the total number of students testing, the subject being tested, the availability of staff and space, the class schedule used on testing days, etc. Test administrators must inform students that, at some point, students who are still testing will be grouped together and students who have completed testing will join a regular or alternate class schedule. Refer to the appropriate scheduling page in the Program Overview section for more information.
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Blank Graphic Organizer
Eligible students may now use a blank piece of paper as a graphic organizer for the TELPAS listening and speaking assessment and the TELPAS reading and writing assessment. Refer to the Supplemental Aids policy documentBased on feedback from educators, students who receive content and language supports will see a different type of pre-read information before STAAR reading language arts passages. The pre-read information is designed to introduce students who need vocabulary comprehension support to unfamiliar vocabulary, concepts, or topics from the passage that are pertinent to the understanding of the passage. Instead of summary paragraphs, the pre-read information will include a list of essential words to more closely align with how vocabulary is previewed during instruction and to decrease the reading load for students.
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Participation Requirements
The TELPAS Alternate participation requirements have been updated to align with the updates to the STAAR Alternate 2 participation requirementsTELPAS regular print, large print, and braille test materials will be included in initial order shipments if district testing personnel have registered students for paper test materials by the due date listed in the Calendar of Events.