Dive Brief:
- Nevada has announced that it will cut ties with test provider Measured Progress after a failed first round of online testing this spring.
- Only a third of the state's students were able to complete the exams, according to KSL.
- Pending approval by the Board of Examiners, CTB/McGraw Hill is poised to take over the $51 million contract, which expired this spring.
Dive Insight:
After widespread outages blocked many Nevada students from logging in during testing, Nevada offered all of its schools a pass from testing. Two other states using Measured Progress, Montana and North Dakota, did the same. It’s not clear what effect that will have on the federal mandate to achieve 95% participation or on schools that use that data for instructional decisions.
The move to online testing has been a rocky one nationwide, with outages and hackings plaguing federal test implementation. But at smaller scales, some charter and traditional schools have begun to use online and game-style testing as a way to frequently assess students progress. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will receive wider adoption.