With the legislative enactment of LD 1276 An Act to Improve Educational Assessments of Maine Students, approved by the governor on June 16, now Private and Special Law 2015, Chapter 10, “Directs the Department of Education to terminate the State’s membership in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.” The discontinuation of membership in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium means that we will not be able to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment in future years. It also terminates Maine’s access to the Smarter Balanced Digital Library.
The Maine DOE is currently working through a competitive process of determining a subsequent method of educational assessment in the content areas of Mathematics and English Language Arts/Literacy. It is important to note that Maine’s content standards in mathematics and ELA/literacy, as defined in the Maine Learning Results, have not changed. Thus, the content assessed in 2016 should be very similar to the content assessed in 2015.
Because the process of scoring constructed-response items took longer than anticipated, earlier estimates of dates for preliminary data being available in the Online Reporting System (ORS) must be revised. Preliminary data intended for internal use will be made available electronically later this month. In ORS, students will be represented as they were designated in the Test Information Distribution Engine (TIDE). Initially, any students who took the assessment as a paper version will not be included in ORS.
Final reports will be available late August. Final school-level and district-level reports for Mathematics, ELA/Literacy and Science will be delivered through the iServices platform. These reports will attribute students (e.g. home-schooled, special considerations, alternate assessment) according to Maine’s decision rules and will include students who took a paper-version test. Also, in late August paper versions of individual student reports will be mailed to the schools for distribution to parents. Schools will also receive labels for inclusion in student cumulative records.
For more assessment information contact the Department’s Acting Assessment Coordinator Nancy Godfrey at nancy.godfrey@maine.gov or 624-6775.