Dear Classroom Teachers,
The mission of Albemarle County Public Schools states:
Working together as a team, we will end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities for our children’s success through high-quality teaching and learning for all. We seek to build relationships with families and communities to ensure that every student succeeds.
We will know every student.
Among the key metrics we use to gauge our progress toward accomplishing our mission are our school division’s SOL results. As reported in the SOL Data Review we presented to the school board in September, we made progress by improving student achievement in 75% of the categories used to measure our success. More specifically, we improved our results in 30 of the 40 areas of measurement across five subject areas. Despite that success, we continue to have persistent achievement gaps and several academic indicators in which our performance falls below state averages.
To help further move us toward meeting our mission, we partnered with Bellwether Education Partners to complete an instructional audit to identify root causes of our persistent gaps and strategies to close those gaps. A key strategy proposed by Bellwether and adopted by the school division involves increasing the frequency and utility of formative assessments to inform both student needs and adult instructional practice. Our first step toward implementing this strategy is the development of common, quarterly assessments that are aligned to our division pacing guides.
Quarterly assessments have been developed for science, reading and math in grades 3-8 and for selected high school courses. These quarterly assessments will be administered through Illuminate at the end of each quarter during the following windows:
- Quarter 1: October 20-26 2023
- Quarter 2: January 18-24, 2024
- Quarter 3: March 22-28, 2024
After each quarterly assessment, student progress on standards in the quarter’s pacing guides will be available for teachers and principals to analyze in order to make instructional adjustments as needed. These data will be available quickly after each administration. Secondary teachers may decide if all or part of the quarterly assessment is included as part of students’ grades. If all or part of the quarterly assessment is included in students’ grades, then the practices in the grading handbook apply. When students are reassessed, teachers should record the new score in PowerSchool; Scores in Illuminate should not be adjusted.
As noted above, our first window for administering these assessments opens Friday, October 20, and all assessments should be completed by Thursday, October 26. The quarterly assessments are designed to take less than one instructional period for the day. Quarterly assessments can be found in Illuminate in the Favorites Widget or by accessing the assessment list and finding the assessment by name. The naming convention used for quarterly assessments is ACPS [grade] [subject] Quarter 1 2023-24 or ACPS [grade] [subject] 1st Qtr 2023-24. If you do not see the assessment you are looking for on the list, you should search Quarter 1 2023-24. When you have found the correct assessment, you should add students to a testing roster and administer the test to your students directly from these assessments.
If you have questions about any of the assessments, please contact the appropriate lead instructional coach:
- Math: Melissa Mitchem
- Science: Katina Dudley
- Elementary Language Arts: Karen Heathcock
- Secondary Language Arts: Monica Cabarcas
Thank you in advance for the work you have done to support our students this year and for ensuring that your first-quarter assessments are completed in the window above.
Dr. Patrick McLaughlin
Assistant Superintendent for Strategic Planning