Transitioning to a New State Testing Vendor
As Texas welcomes a new partnership with testing vendor, Cambium, Education Advanced welcomes the opportunity to guide our clients through this transition. To support testing coordinators and education leaders, the TestHound team has added new tools and features to ensure a smooth process for registering students for assessments, providing appropriate student accommodations, and accessing necessary files and reports.
>>> New TestHound Tools to Support Beginning-of-Year and Interim Assessments
The Performance Tracker toolkit was designed to help testing coordinators manage the complicated process of keeping track of student state testing history. This TestHound toolkit is the natural place to house many of the updates and features specifically designed to make the transition to Cambium seamless for TestHound users in Texas.
New and recent releases include the ability to:
- Generate Test Registration Files to register students for appropriate tests for STAAR, EOC, BOY, and Interim Assessments
- Generate the Test Attribute Files for upload into Cambium’s Test Information and Distribution Engine (TIDE) system to flag students with the correct attributes for each test
- Generate Student Data Request Reports (formerly SIRS) and load into the TIDE system to gather student test results
- Generate the TIDE Roster for upload to ensure the correct test tickets are printed efficiently
- Generate the End-of-Course Eligibility report turns on the specific EOC flag for the student to be able to test
- Generate the BOY Eligibility Report to turn on the eligibility for EOC students participating in the BOY assessments
- Generate the Interim Off Grade Testing Report to identify students taking an “above grade level” Interim Test as well as turn on the eligibility for students taking an Interim EOC assessment
>>> How the COVID-19 Pandemic has Affected State Testing
What else has TestHound been up to?
One of the most appreciated changes Cambium released was the transition from PEIMS/Social Security Numbers to the TSDS numbers. For districts with Performance Tracker, the demographics service has been modified to accept files containing no PEIMS/Social Security Numbers. The test results files will now match students’ test results based on the TSDS number.
The Texas Education Agency has also been transitioning to online testing. HB 3906 lays out a plan to transition all state assessments to online by 2022-2023. Click here for more information. The TestHound team has also been busy building out a feature that will allow districts and campuses to make mass coding decisions. This new feature will allow several options to help drive coding decisions. Being able to mass code students as online or paper will assist in the proper coding on the test registration file.
TestHound continues to be the most comprehensive assessment management tool in existence and our team is proud to increase its capacity to help assessment coordination be as accurate and efficient as possible, especially in this transition year for the state of Texas. Click here to schedule a demo and meet your new “test” friend.
