For the 2011-2012 school year, no students in Colorado will be taking the Colorado State Assessment Program (CSAP), instead they will be taking a brand new, similar looking test, the Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP). All freshmen and sophomores at FRHS are required to participate in this new state-wide assessment.
From a student’s perspective, the new TCAP test is going to be virtually identical to the CSAP test. The only change that students will notice is going to be the acronym on the cover of the test booklet. However, there are several key changes behind the scenes that students may not notice, “The TCAP gives students the opportunity of higher order thinking which didn’t happen in the CSAP and it will address some of the new standards at the Colorado Department of Education,” said Dr. Dwayne Schmitz, PSD’s Assessment & Accreditation Research Analyst at the PSD Board of Educator’s Orientation Meeting on September 15, 2011. These new standards completely change the type of content that will be inside the test. There will most likely be more open ended questions instead of all multiple choice.
What does this mean for freshmen and sophomores? The lowerclassmen at FRHS are still going to take this assessment program. There aren’t many noticeable changes regarding the test, rather the changes are happening behind the scenes and are not obvious to the test taker.
The overall goal for the TCAP is to give the students of Colorado the opportunity to transition into an even newer test in the following years which will address all of the Department of Education’s new standards. The TCAP test is a one year test and will only be taken during the 2011-2012 school year. In the 2012-2013 school year, the TCAP test will be thrown out and there will be an entirely new test which takes into account all of the new standards from the Department of Education. No new announcements have been made releasing information about the 2012-2013 test. ♦
Know Your District is a reoccurring column in every issue that reports findings at the district level in an easy and comprehensible way to the students at FRHS. This article will be published in the October 21, 2011 issue of Etched in Stone
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