Notice of February 2024 STAAR Stand-Alone Field Test
| Date: | July 27, 2023 |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Notice of February 2024 STAAR Stand-Alone Field Test |
| Category: | Student Assessment |
| Next Steps: | Share with appropriate staff |
The purpose of this communication is to notify Texas public school districts and open-enrollment charter schools (local educational agencies or LEAs) of a required State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) Stand-Alone Field Test to be administered in February 2024.
As required by House Bill 3906, 86th Texas Legislature, 2019, STAAR underwent a redesign to better align the assessments with classroom instruction. The redesign was implemented in the 2022–2023 school year and included the addition of writing to reading assessments and more non-multiple-choice questions such as open-ended or constructed-response items. Although the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has made a concerted effort to minimize the amount of instructional time used for state testing purposes generally and particularly for stand-alone field testing, a stand-alone field test is necessary to develop future state assessments with writing components.
February 2024 Administration
The stand-alone field test is scheduled for February 5–9, 2024. It will be administered online only and will include the following grades/subjects and courses:
- Reading Language Arts (RLA) grades 3–8
- English I and English II
- Spanish RLA grades 3–5
All students at a selected campus who are enrolled in an assigned grade or course and who are scheduled to take the corresponding STAAR assessment in spring 2024 should participate in the stand-alone field test. This includes emergent bilingual students and students who receive special education services, unless a student requires an accommodation that is not available for the field test. (Most online accommodations—including content and language supports, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text—will be available for students who need them, but American Sign Language and Braille versions will not be available for the stand-alone field test.) Updating a student’s required documentation is not necessary for participation in the field test or for accommodations used during the field test.
(LEAs may administer the field test at any time during the testing window. TEA will provide test administration instructions online. No paper test booklets, answer documents, or other print materials will be sent to LEAs, nor will LEAs receive field-test data from this administration.
LEA Requirements
LEAs will be notified of their selection to participate in the February 2024 STAAR Stand-Alone Field Test by August 7, 2023. The design of the sampling plan minimizes the assignments for each selected campus. When identifying the field-test sample, the sampling plan excludes certain campuses (for example, campuses selected to administer the National Assessment of Education Progress in 2024).
As required by Texas Education Code, Section 39.035, administering the February 2024 STAAR Stand-Alone Field Test is mandatory for those campuses that are selected. Field-test data from a sample of students who are representative of the state are critical to the state’s ability to build high-quality assessments, and TEA recognizes the challenges campuses face regarding time and personnel resources when they are selected to participate in mandatory state testing activities. Your continued support of these crucial activities is greatly appreciated.
Campuses that were not selected to participate in the stand-alone field test may also volunteer to administer it. To do so, district testing coordinators should submit the name of the district and campuses and the grades and courses for which they wish to volunteer to Texas Testing Support at 833-601-8821, TexasTestingSupport@cambiumassessment.com, or TexasAssessment.gov via live chat. The deadline to volunteer for the stand-alone field test is November 30, 2023.
For more information regarding the STAAR redesign, refer to the STAAR Redesign webpage on the TEA website. If you have any questions about the stand-alone field test, please submit them to TEA using the Student Assessment Help Desk.
Texas Education Agency
Student Assessment Division
(512) 463-9536