Added by Stats. 1995, Ch. 975, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 1996.
This chapter shall be known and may be cited as the Leroy Greene California Assessment of Academic Achievement Act.
Article 1 - General Provisions
California Education Code — §§ 60600-60603
Sections (4)
Added by Stats. 2013, Ch. 489, Sec. 4. (AB 484) Effective January 1, 2014. Section operative July 1, 2014, by its own provisions.
(a)It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this chapter to provide a system of assessments of pupils that has the primary purposes of assisting teachers, administrators, and pupils and their parents; improving teaching and learning; and promoting high-quality teaching and learning using a variety of assessment approaches and item types. The assessments, where applicable and valid, will produce scores that can be aggregated and disaggregated for the purpose of holding schools and local educational agencies accountable for the achievement of all their pupils in learning the California academic content standards. The system includes assessments or assessment tools for multiple grade levels that cover the full breadth
and depth of the curriculum and promote the teaching of the full curriculum. In order to accomplish these goals, the Legislature finds and declares that California should adopt a coordinated and consolidated testing system to do all of the following:
(1)Develop and adopt a set of statewide academically rigorous content standards in all major subject areas to serve as the basis for modeling and promoting high-quality teaching and learning activities across the entire curriculum and assessing the academic achievement of pupils, as well as for schools, school districts, and for the California education system as a whole. Exclusive of those assessments established by a multistate consortium, produce performance standards to be adopted by the state board designed to lead to specific grade level benchmarks of academic achievement for
each subject area tested within each grade level based on the knowledge, skills, and processes that pupils will need in order to succeed in the information-based, global economy of the 21st century.
(2)Provide information and resources to schools and local educational agencies to assist with the selection of local benchmark assessments, diagnostic assessments, and formative tools aligned with the state-adopted California academic content standards. The Legislature recognizes the importance of local tools and assessments used by schools and local educational agencies to monitor pupil achievement and to identify individual pupil strengths and weaknesses. The Legislature further recognizes the role the state may play in leveraging resources to provide schools and local educational agencies with information and tools for use at their
discretion.
(3)Ensure that all assessment procedures, items, instruments, scoring systems, and results meet high standards of statistical reliability and validity, and that they do not use procedures, items, instruments, or scoring practices that are racially, culturally, socioeconomically, or gender biased.
(4)Provide information to pupils, parents and guardians, teachers, schools, and local educational agencies on a timely basis so the information can be used to further the development of the pupil or to improve the educational program. The Legislature recognizes that the majority of the assessments in the system will generate individual pupil scores that will provide information on pupil achievement to pupils, their parents or guardians, teachers, schools, and local
educational agencies. The Legislature further recognizes that some assessments in the system may solely generate results at the school, school district, county, or state level for purposes of improving the education program and promoting the teaching and learning of the full curriculum.
(5)When administered as a census administration, results should be reported in terms describing a pupil’s academic performance in relation to the statewide academically rigorous content and performance standards and in terms of college and career readiness skills possessed by the pupil, in addition to being reported as a numerical. When appropriate, the reports should include a measure of growth that describes a pupil’s current status in relation to past performance.
(6)Where feasible,
administer assessments via technology to enhance the assessment of challenging content using innovative item types and to facilitate expedited scoring.
(7)Minimize the amount of instructional time devoted to assessments administered pursuant to this chapter. It is the intent of the Legislature that any redundancies in statewide testing be eliminated as soon as is feasible.
(b)It is the intent of the Legislature, pursuant to this article, to initiate planning for the implementation process to enable the Superintendent to accomplish the goals set forth in this section as soon as feasible.
(c)It is the intent of the Legislature that parents, classroom teachers, other educators, pupil representatives, institutions of higher
education, business community members, and the public be involved, in an active and ongoing basis, in the design and implementation of the statewide pupil assessment system and the development of assessment instruments. The Legislature recognizes the important role that these stakeholders play in the success of the statewide pupil assessment system and the importance of providing them with information and resources about the new statewide system including the goals and appropriate uses of the system.
(d)It is the intent of the Legislature, insofar as is practically and fiscally feasible and following the completion of annual testing, that the content, test structure, and test items in the assessments that are part of the statewide pupil assessment system become open and transparent to teachers, parents, and pupils, to assist stakeholders
in working together to demonstrate improvement in pupil academic achievement. A planned change in annual test content, format, or design should be made available to educators and the public well before the beginning of the school year in which the change will be implemented.
(e)It is the intent of the Legislature that the results of the statewide pupil assessments be available for use, after appropriate validation, for academic credit, or placement and admissions processes, or both, at postsecondary educational institutions.
(f)This section shall become operative on July 1, 2014.
Added by Stats. 2016, Ch. 29, Sec. 29. (SB 828) Effective June 27, 2016.
It is the intent of the Legislature that the department minimize the impact to teachers and administrators and state resources by ensuring, where feasible, that future California computer-based assessments utilize the assessment delivery system infrastructure and hosting platform outlined in the Smarter Balanced Technical Hosting Solution, as approved by the Department of Technology for the statewide pupil assessment system. All computer-based statewide assessments, to the extent possible and most cost-effective, shall be developed to operate on the existing approved infrastructure, provide a single logical access point, support a single secure browser for remote and local access, and utilize uniform system development standards. The assessment delivery system infrastructure shall be
scalable in nature to allow the department to incorporate additional computer-based statewide assessments as funded.
Amended by Stats. 2018, Ch. 865, Sec. 27. (AB 2319) Effective January 1, 2019.
As used in this chapter:
(a)“Achievement level descriptors” means a narrative description of the knowledge, skills, and processes expected of pupils at different grade levels and at different performance levels on achievement tests.
(b)“Achievement test” means any summative standardized test that measures the level of performance that a pupil has achieved on state-adopted content standards.
(c)“California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP)” means the comprehensive assessment system, inclusive of consortium-developed assessments, that has the primary purpose of modeling and promoting high-quality teaching and instruction using a variety
of assessment approaches and item types.
(d)“Census administration” means a test administration in which all pupils take comparable assessments of the same content and where results of individual performance are appropriate and meaningful to parents, pupils, and teachers.
(e)“Computer-adaptive assessment” means a computer-based test that utilizes a computer program to adjust the difficulty of test items throughout a testing session based on a test taker’s responses to previous test items during that testing session.
(f)“Computer-based assessment” means a test administered using an electronic computing device.
(g)“Consortium” means a multistate collaborative organized to develop a comprehensive system of assessments or formative tools such as
described in Section 60605.7.
(h)“Constructed-response questions” means a type of assessment item that requires pupils to construct their own answers.
(i)“Content standards” means the specific academic knowledge, skills, and abilities that all public schools in this state are expected to teach, and all pupils are expected to learn, in reading, writing, mathematics, history-social science, world languages, visual and performing arts, and science, at each grade level tested.
(j)“Diagnostic assessment” means an assessment of particular knowledge or skills a pupil has or has not yet achieved for the purpose of informing instruction and making placement decisions.
(k)“End of course examination” means a comprehensive and challenging assessment of pupil
achievement in a particular subject area or discipline.
(l)“Field test” means an assessment or assessment items administered to a representative sample of a population to ensure that the test or item produces results that are valid, reliable, and fair.
(m)“Formative assessment tools” means assessment tools and processes that are embedded in instruction and used by teachers and pupils to provide timely feedback for purposes of adjusting instruction to improve learning.
(n)“High-quality assessment” means an assessment designed to measure a pupil’s knowledge of, understanding of, and ability to apply, critical concepts through the use of a variety of item types and formats, including, but not necessarily limited to, items that allow for constructed responses and items that require the completion of performance tasks.
A high-quality assessment should have the following characteristics:
(1)Enable measurement of pupil achievement and pupil growth to the extent feasible.
(2)Be of high technical quality by being valid, reliable, fair, and aligned to standards.
(3)Incorporate technology where appropriate.
(4)Include the assessment of pupils with disabilities and English learners.
(5)Use, to the extent feasible, universal design principles, as defined in Section 3 of the federal Assistive Technology Act of 1998 (29 U.S.C. Sec. 3002) in its development and administration.
(o)“Interim assessment” means an assessment that is designed to be
given during the school year to evaluate a pupil’s knowledge and skills relative to specific academic standards in order to provide timely feedback, used in combination with other sources of information teachers have about their pupils’ progress, for purposes of continually adjusting instruction to improve learning, and that produces results that can be aggregated by classroom, course, grade level, or school.
(p)“Local educational agency” means a county office of education, school district, state special school, or direct-funded charter school as described in Section 47651.
(q)“Matrix sampling” means administering different portions of a single assessment to different groups of pupils for the purpose of sampling a broader representation of content and reducing testing time.
(r)“Performance standards” are standards
that define various levels of competence at each grade level in each of the curriculum areas for which content standards are established. Performance standards gauge the degree to which a pupil has met the content standards and the degree to which a school or school district has met the content standards.
(s)“Performance tasks” are a collection of questions or activities that relate to a single scenario that include pupil interaction with stimulus. Performance tasks are a means to assess more complex skills such as writing, research, and analysis.
(t)“Personally identifiable information” includes a pupil’s name and other direct personal identifiers, such as the pupil’s identification number. Personally identifiable information also includes indirect identifiers, such as the pupil’s address and personal characteristics, or other information that would make the pupil’s identity
easily traceable through the use of a single or multiple data sources, including publicly available information.
(u)“Population sampling” means administering assessments to a representative sample of pupils instead of the entire pupil population. The sample of pupils shall be representative in terms of various pupil subgroups, including, but not necessarily limited to, English learners and pupils with disabilities.
(v)“Recently arrived English learner” means a pupil designated as an English learner who is in his or her first 12 months of attending a school in the United States.
(w)“State-determined assessment calendar” means the scheduling of assessments, exclusive of those subject area assessments listed in subdivision (b) of Section 60640, over several years on a predetermined schedule. Content areas and grades
shall only be assessed after being publicly announced at least two school years in advance of the assessment.
(x)“Summative assessment” means an assessment designed to be given near the end of the school year to evaluate a pupil’s knowledge and skills relative to a specific set of academic standards.