SAGE Testing

SAGE Testing

The Utah State Office Education (USOE) has released the new adaptive assessment called SAGE.  The SAGE acronym stands for Student Assessment for Growth and Excellence.  SAGE is the new Utah computer adaptive assessment system, aligned to the State’s language arts, mathematics and science standards.  This year SAGE will replace the testing platform that students use for their end of year testing.  The old CRT (Criterion Reference Test) was only composed of approximately 60 multiple choice questions that were administered at the end of the school year. Computer adaptive testing allows more information to be gathered about the students’ cognitive ability in a shorter amount of time.  The SAGE testing bank consists of over ten thousand questions with the ability to scale the level of each question to match each student’s cognitive ability. The adaptive testing software in SAGE employs an algorithm that adapts the test in real time responding to the accuracy of a student’s performance. Each question a student is given will depend on the students response to the previous questions.  This allows the algorithm to more accurately and efficiently determine a student’s level of proficiency. At the end of this school year, all schools Districts will be required to administer the SAGE Summative assessment in grades 3-12 in the subjects of language arts, mathematics and science (3rd grade does not test in science).  SAGE will include writing, graphing, virtual labs, drag and drop, and other measures of student achievement in the testing module.  Unlike the old CRT that only consisted of multiple-choice answers, SAGE will allow the student to interact with the test by accessing tools such as rules, lines, short answer essays, etc.  At the beginning of school in August 2014, SAGE will allow students to participate in formative assessment.  The formative assessments will allow parents and teachers to acquire a base line of where the student will be when they enter that particular grade.  A formative assessment will be given again mid-year to track the growth of each student.  The SAGE system will provide school districts with accurate fall to spring growth for all students.  The student growth will then be tracked for their entire educational career.   Students, parents, and teachers can access sample questions in the SAGE portal allowing students to become familiar with the tools and format of the questions students will receive during the testing.  You can access the SAGE testing portal at http://sageportal.org/.  This portal will not correct the test questions, but will allow students to become more familiar with the SAGE tools.  In the next few weeks, students will be given individual usernames and passwords, which will allow the student to access sample questions in the SAGE portal.  I would like to encourage parents and students to access the SAGE portal to increase their familiarity with the new test platform.  I would like to inform the parents that the new adaptive assessment results in SAGE should not be compared to the old CRT test because they are a completely different assessment tool.  Please, also be prepared for lower proficiencies in students because of the new SAGE adaptive assessments.  When adaptive assessments have been administered in other states, the number of students who are proficient was sometimes up to 30% lower when compared to the older CRT test.  The lower proficiencies do not mean students are not ready to advance to the next grade; it simply means students will be assessed in completely different adaptive assessment environment.  If you would like to read additional information relating to SAGE, you can access the USOE web page for assessment at:

http://www.schools.utah.gov/assessment/Adaptive-Assessment-System.aspx

–Superintendent Ben Dalton

Leave a Reply