Indiana is redesigning its state test again. It’ll still be ILEARN. But now, instead of just taking ILEARN in the spring, students will experience three ILEARN checkpoints during the year in the lead-up to the real deal in the spring. The IDOE is calling this shift a “through-year model.”

Around 70% of schools statewide have opted in to the model for the 2024-25 school year. The new framework will apply to all schools starting with the 2025-26 school year. This year’s first checkpoint window opened on September 16.

The New ILEARN Testing Schedule

Rationale from IDOE for this overhaul is that previous results at the end of the year were useful for system-wide analysis and larger strategic pivots but offered little of value that was immediately actionable to individual schools, educators, and families.

For example, a student takes the test in the spring. Results come out in late summer. By the time the student went back in school, they likely had a new teacher. They may even be at a new school. And chances are their previous ILEARN performance is lost in the shuffle.

Building in three checkpoints leading up to the official test is supposed to provide schools and educators with actionable data about where students are, what skills they have yet to master, and what interventions might be needed to ensure a student is prepared to pass the real ILEARN in the spring.  Here’s a snapshot of what the updated ILEARN schedule looks like:

• ILEARN Checkpoint 1 opened September 14 and closes November 15
• ILEARN Checkpoint 2 opens November 18 and closes February 7
• ILEARN Checkpoint 3 opens February 10 and closes April 11
• The actual ILEARN testing window opens April 14 and closes May 9

Schools have flexibility in when they administer each checkpoint. It just has to be done within that window.

How Quickly Will Results Be Available?

Each checkpoint includes 20-25 questions and “will show how your child is doing in key skills and concepts from the Indiana Academic Standards.” Here’s an overview of what is tested at each checkpoint in every grade from 3-8.

The state committed to September 23 as the day districts and individual schools were first supposed to be able to access student results during the initial window. From there, I’ll speculate that IDOE intends to deliver student results to schools in about a week.

What’s less clear is if that standard will hold throughout the academic year. Each checkpoint window is about two months long. Individual schools will surely complete assessments in just a couple of days or even a single day. But with such a wide range, school and district results could be trickling in all throughout a window. It’ll be interesting to see how quick they trickle back out to schools and if the turnaround remains quick enough to be useful.

What Will Families Receive?

I’m also curious to see how quickly student results will get into the hands of parents. Schools are expected to communicate student results to families. But how they do so, and what all they decide to communicate beyond the basics, is entirely up to individual districts. Will what parents receive be useful information?

Let me give you an example of what I think might happen. Families will likely get back something that indicates whether their student is “on-track” or “not-on-track.” Maybe it even specifies areas they have yet to achieve mastery like “Roots, prefixes, suffixes” or “Text comprehension.” If that comes attached to how the school plans to support their student, great!

That could be really useful in making families partners in their student’s education. It could be fertile ground for parent-teacher conferences or even something the parent uses to check in with their teachers about progress. But that depends on schools.

What Will Schools Do With the Data?

What schools distribute to parents is also not entirely the point. The point (or what I imagine the biggest point is from the IDOE’s perspective) is largely what schools do with this data.

(Side not: these ILEARN checkpoints are an addition to school’s testing regime. They are also likely meant to be replacements for some of the formative assessments schools already use. I’ll be curious to see how schools balance that.)

For instance, when I taught middle school English, my school had students take NWEA MAP at the beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year. We got those results almost instantly and built many of our intervention plans on the back of them.

If schools receive results in a timely enough manner, they can ideally leverage these data to better support students in ways that add up to increased academic achievement on ILEARN. But it really does depend on the timeliness of schools receiving the data and school’s willingness to make use of what they receive.

I hear a lot of complaints from certain corners of the education world that we’re already testing our kids to death. This certainly won’t alleviate those concerns as it inevitably increases the number of hours in a school year that students spend on testing. But there’s real potential here for state test results to finally be actionable during the school year. Useful at last for looking forward, not just for looking back.