Time of Year to Test

Although schools can administer the tests any time throughout the school year, it is recommended that the ITED be given in the fall.

There is an important reason why fall administration of the ITED is recommended, and it concerns the usefulness of the test results for their intended purposes. The ITED tests were developed primarily as a tool for improving classroom instruction and student learning. The information obtained from administering the tests is intended to be used by teachers and others to help make instructional decisions about their classes and the individual students in them. Two important uses of the scores are to check year-to-year progress in important academic skills and to determine areas of relative strength and weakness. For the results to be used most effectively, they should be available early in the school year so that teachers, counselors, and administrators have a chance to incorporate the information in decisions they make about instruction. Obviously, if test results come back to the district in the spring, teachers have little or no time to use the scores for instructional purposes in the current school year. However, if the results are available by December, they can be used to advantage in the remaining two-thirds of the year. In addition, when the tests are administered in the fall, the results are less likely to be used directly for teacher accountability purposes. Spring testing–because it occurs so close to the end of a major instructional segment (the school year)–permits, even invites, the results to be used to evaluate individual teachers or administrators. Even though scores from spring testing are not intended to be used this way -- by school boards, by the press, by the public in general, or by other educators -- teachers' perceptions that the scores might be used this way can undermine morale and contribute to counterproductive attitudes toward the testing program. While teachers realize that such uses of test results are inappropriate and unfair, they cannot feel assured that this kind of misuse will not occur, in spite of the fact that it is not possible to disentangle the effects of previous teaching from that taking place in the current year.