Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot

The Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot (TTAP) will explore whether Texas’s current summative assessment can be replaced with a cohesive progress monitoring system.

Overview of the Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot

House Bill 3906, 86th Texas Legislature, 2019, required the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to develop and pilot an innovative, through-year assessment model as a possible replacement of the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR^®) summative tests. A through-year assessment model refers to a progress monitoring system that provides students multiple opportunities throughout the school year to demonstrate their mastery of standards and to contribute to their summative performance level reported at the end of the year.

TTAP has been designed in collaboration with Texas educators, administrators, students, and families. The progress monitoring system will have three, short testing opportunities – one in the fall, winter, and spring. To ensure that all districts can retain their local curriculum, each TTAP progress monitoring opportunity will cover the full scope of the curriculum. Each opportunity will use a multi-stage adaptive design, allowing for shorter tests with greater accuracy to minimize the disruption to instructional time.

TTAP is a multi-year, fully online pilot that launched in school year 2022–2023. The model will be piloted over several years to assess its benefits and to ensure that the design maintains the rigorous level of validity and reliability that STAAR currently meets, in hopes of creating a scoring methodology that is comparable and can be used for state accountability.

Feedback from pilot participants (i.e., Texas students, teachers, administrators) will help measure the impacts of this progress monitoring system and inform how data can best be used to support instruction.

Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot Year 2

Year 2 of the pilot will take place during the 2023-2024 school year; applications are now closed, and TEA is in the process of confirming district participants. The same grade levels and subjects that were piloted during year 1 will be offered during year 2. Additional grade levels and subjects will be added to the pilot in following years. 

• Grade 5 science
• Grade 6 math
• Grade 7 math
• Grade 8 social studies

Year 2 will include the addition of the content and language supports and individual predictions to the STAAR, as well as additional supplemental training resources for TTAP participants.

Key Dates and Details for 2023–2024

Note: The Year 2 training schedule will be posted at a later date.

Benefits of the Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot

Participation in the pilot is optional and does not eliminate the obligation to administer STAAR. Districts that participate in the through-year pilot during the 2023-24 school year will experience the following benefits:

• Multiple Testing Opportunities - Students will have three opportunities to demonstrate mastery of TEKS over the course of the school year. TTAP assessments serve as a viable replacement to locally adopted benchmarks and are 100% TEKS aligned. 
• Timely Student Reports - After each testing opportunity, teachers will receive individualized student reports, which include data such as performance levels, prediction to the STAAR, and in-year growth. These reports can be used in discussions with students and parents to share progress.
• Flexible Training Options - Teachers will receive training on accessing and interpreting student results to form instructional groups and support classroom instructional decisions. In Year 2, TEA  will continue to offer synchronous and asynchronous training options, along with additional training supplements for optional access.
• Additional Online Platform and Item Type Exposure - All TTAP progress monitoring opportunities will be administered on the same online platform as STAAR, giving students additional chances to interact with the system’s functionalities. TTAP participants will be also able to interact with different question types that are now used on the redesigned STAAR test.

Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot Resources

• 2023-2024 FAQs (updated 04/14/23)
• 2023-2024 TTAP Year 2 Informational Webinar Recording (updated 04/14/23)
• 2023-2024 TTAP Year 2 Informational Webinar Slides (updated 04/25/23)
• 2023-2024 TTAP District Participation (pending Fall 2023)
• 2023-2024 TTAP Schedule of Events (pending Fall 2023)