The Texas Education Agency (TEA) offered optional end-of-year (EOY) and beginning-of-year (BOY) assessments from May-June 2020 and from July- October 2020, respectively. Researchers used statistical techniques to extrapolate this BOY data to the entire state.
The results of the study indicated the test results show an effect on student learning representing about 3.2 months of instructional loss, in addition to the typical 2.5 months of summer learning loss. The study also noted, “Since both the EOY and BOY tests were optional tests, the overall test results may not contain a representative sample of students from across the state,” furthermore, the study concluded in the results, “As such, the performance of the EOY sample, even with stratified sampling, is likely not generalizable to statewide student performance, and these differences should be interpreted with caution.”
BOY assessments were available from July 27, 2020, until October 16, 2020 and were designed to diagnose student understanding of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) from the previous school year. The TEA also noted they are not using data from the BOY assessments for any accountability purposes.
A total of 49 districts or charter schools administered at least one electronic EOY assessment. 334 different districts or charters participated in the electronic version of the BOY assessments, and only 0.01% of students who took the BOY tests were registered by parents.
Due to print on demand capabilities of the PDF form, it was not possible to measure the number of paper tests administered, but for the EOY electronic tests a total of 63,255 were administered and for the BOY electronic test a total of 648,609 were administered.
