ATI Supports Districts and Charters in the Transition to New Statewide Assessments

ATI is taking several measures to assist districts and charters across the nation as they transition to new forms of statewide testing reflecting new rigorous educational standards. For example, some states have contracted with American Institutes of Research (AIR) for statewide testing. Arizona is one such state. This spring, administration of Arizona's Measurement of Educational Readiness to Inform Teaching (AzMERIT) as the new statewide assessment to measure student ability in English language arts and math took place. ATI is supporting districts and charters in Arizona and other states prepare students for new statewide assessments in a number of ways including:

• Creation of assessment items aligned to Common Core and local state standards and, in many instances, reflective of the technology enhanced (TE) items planned for the online testing environments by AIR and others.
• Development of the Galileo Digital Curriculum Platform that will support districts/charters as they move toward the integration of instruction and assessment called for in current best practices approaches to education. Instructional Dialogs in the Digital Curriculum Platform provide a place for students to respond to new TE item types and to develop expanded test taking skills.
• Creation of district-wide assessments aligned to published test blueprints (e.g., PARCC, SBAC, and AzMERIT) and to district pacing guides.

Read more about how ATI can help in preparing students for new statewide assessments or contact us to learn more.

Next Generation Assessments: Student tools to support online testing are a focus of ongoing development for ATI

This year many school districts began using statewide assessments that were delivered entirely online. These next generation assessments require students to not only answer multiple-choice questions, but also to use digital tools to solve problems. Rather than answer a multiple choice question about a theme a student might be asked to actually highlight a passage in a text that describes that theme. They might be asked to sort words by the part of speech they represent or use a scientific calculator to compute the answer to a complicated math problem. These tools are intended to provide a richer and more authentic evaluation of the skill of interest.

ATI continues to develop features that support next generation online testing with Galileo technology enhanced (TE) items. A scientific calculator is under development and is scheduled for release in the next few weeks. Additional calculators are being developed and are planned for use at different grade levels. Other tools supporting online testing currently under development include strike-through, highlighting, the ability to take notes, and text to speech. These tools are scheduled to be available for use in the 2015-16 school year.


The scientific calculator may be made available selectively for use in desired assessments. Students will easily access the calculator from an icon in the top right of the assessment item.  

For more information about how ATI is supporting districts/charters implementing assessment including TE items, schedule a Galileo overview.

Prepare Students Today with Galileo’s Technology Enhanced Items

Students across the nation are or will be experiencing new forms of assessment involving a wide variety of Technology Enhanced (TE) items. In an effort to assist districts and charters to prepare students for this next generation of assessments, ATI is introducing the new forms of assessment in the context of digital curriculums. The digital curriculums support instruction aligned to new and changing standards and provide opportunities to learn to respond to new forms of assessment.

Several distinct types of TE items are available now for use in Galileo’s digital curriculums. There is no need to wait to start using the TE items. They include the: multi-part item, selectable text item, sequencing item, expanded selected response item, performance-based item, and customized TE item. As its name implies, the customized TE item can be used to build a broad array of item types. Moreover, the ATI customized TE item type can be used to rapidly emulate new item types that may emerge in the future. Learn more about Galileo TE items.

TE items are available in various subjects for kindergarten through high school.

Customized TE items for kindergarten contain an audio recording of the item.

View a sample TE item.