Kentucky begins a new public school assessment program beginning in the 2011-2012 school year. These assessments are collectively named the Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) tests.
The new assessment for grades 3-8 is a blended model built with norm-referenced test (NRT) and criterion-referenced test (CRT) items which consist of multiple-choice (mc), extended-response (er) and short answer (sa) items. The NRT portion, the Stanford 10, is a purchased test with national norms and the CRT portion is customized for Kentucky.
NCS Pearson has been awarded the contract to provide all assessments for grades 3-8 and writing on-demand at high school.
NCS Pearson currently provides large-scale assessment services in more than 25 states and for the U.S. Department of Education.
The high school K-PREP also includes four (4) end-of-course assessments purchased from ACT's QualityCore program. Click here for more information.
Below are sample items that have been developed for each part of the assessment (CRT and NRT). Additional items will be added based upon availability.
NRT portion of K-PREP assessment:
Sample Content for the Kentucky State Assessment from the Stanford Achievement Test Series, Tenth Edition
(Stanford 10)
The following sample items are offered to show educators the format and appearance of the test items students will see in 2012 for the norm-referenced portion of the K-PREP.
These items are not intended to reflect the difficulty of the Stanford content. They were selected to show the types of questions that students will answer and how reading passages and test items will be presented in print.
Samples are included for Reading Comprehension, Mathematics Problem Solving, Language, Science and Social Science.
CRT portion of K-PREP assessment:
In addition to the traditionally used multiple-choice and open-response item types, K-PREP has added the short answer question type. Samples of short answer questions are included on this page.
Writing samples are included for grades 5, 6, 8, 10 and 11 for both passage-based and stand-alone prompts. Annotated samples will be available in 2012.