The Arizona Board of Education has picked a new test to monitor the progress of public school students.
The board has chosen AzMERIT as the AIMS test replacement. Student progress will now be measured by Arizona’s Measurement of Educational Readiness to Inform Teaching.
“The new assessment will be assessing, measuring the standards that have been in place, that were adopted by the state Board of Education in 2010, after over a year of public comment," said Christine Thompson, executive director of the state Department of Education.
Thompson urges parents to have faith in the new test. The not-for-profit “American Institutes for Research” is getting the nearly $19 million contract to develop and implement the test in both a paper and an online version.
The new test will be administered for the first time in the spring of 2015.