Your monthly update on all things MS-CPAS!
July  2019  Issue
Freedom and the Fourth!
 
As the dog days of summer are upon us, the month of July always signals a time of rest integrated with professional development and planning for CTE educators across our state. 

Our assessment team is preparing for postsecondary summer testing and drafting technical reports and manuals for the next school year. As a reminder, our team is presenting on numerous topics at the 2019 MS ACTE Summer Conference this July 24-26 in Jackson. The topics range from national certifications and performance assessments to improving overall classroom assessment quality in your CTE center. The staff enjoys presenting at the conference and interacting with each of you in hopes that we will continue to improve each year for our students. There are a few things we are working on for the upcoming academic year that I want to highlight:
  1. Practice Tests: We are adding the capability for programs that have fall testing to offer two practice tests for students in the fall. Programs that test in the spring still cannot fall test. We are hoping to add that feature in the 2020-2021 school year.
  2. Certification Policy: All programs will need to verify students in our system to be included in the MDE Accountability Model report. Each summer, we upload the students that we have in our system that have certification results. Students that are unverified will not be included in the MDE certification report starting in the 2019-2020 school year. Unverified students increase the work on our staff and increases the time it takes us to get data to MDE.
  3. Other Important Updates: The 2019-2020 testing dates and updated CTE Testing Manual will be released on our website later this month.
 
See you at MS ACTE! 

Sean Owen, PhD
Assessment Manager
Important Dates
 
Summer Roster Submission for Postsecondary Schools Deadline.....................July 2
Summer Postsecondary Testing.....................................................................July 8-12
Postsecondary Final Reports Available.............................................................July 26
MS-CPAS Updates

In our preparations for the new academic year, we have posted 2019-2020 test blueprints for each program. You can find them here.
 
We are also making plans for upcoming item alignment and development meetings. Teachers from the groups below will be working to update and align test banks to revised curricula.
  • Agriculture Power and Machinery
  • Business
  • Simulation and Animation Design
  • Health Science (Core)
  • Fire and EMS
  • Precision Machining
  • Metal Fabrication
  • Polymer Science
Please be on the lookout for invitations to participate in these important meetings.  
National Certifications Updates
  
National certification reports are now available. You can access reports for all national certifications in the "Reports" section of the RCU Assessment page. Also, you can pull detailed NCCER score reports in the NCCER testing management system. Just log into the system, select your testing location, and then select "Score Reports." You will have to input at least one of the required criteria for population. Once the reports load, select one or all of your students, then select "Print Detailed Report."
 
NCCER baseline testing for the 2019-2020 school year is coming up in August. This year, NCCER students will have to be verified in the RCU portal before baseline testing begins. Stay tuned for more information about fall verification for baseline testing, including the dates for verification and baseline testing itself.
 
Be on the lookout for new blueprint summaries for the NCCER pathways. These blueprints will be available on the RCU website soon. Please continue to monitor our website for more updates and developments regarding all things assessment.
 
ASE students will also have to be verified in the RCU portal before certification tests are taken.  
 
If the 2019-2020 academic year is the first year your school district offers a CTE course whose end-of-course assessment is a national certification, please send us a Help Desk ticket  so we can ensure we have the proper amount of resources and testing inventory on hand for all of the CTE students in our state. 
Performance-Based Assessment
  
As the new project manager for performance-based assessments, I'd like to introduce myself and let you know about some upcoming events related to PBA. 

I joined the RCU in 2018 as a project manager on the assessment team. In addition to managing PBA, my responsibilities also include the statistical analysis of the MS-CPAS and conducting assessment-related research. I enjoyed meeting many of you this previous academic year either through the MS-CPAS standard-setting or PBA state scoring processes.
 
During the 2019-2020 academic year, we will continue to administer PBA for the Year 2 courses in the architecture and drafting, digital media technology, polymer science, and simulation and animation pathways. I will host a work session for each of these pathways at MS ACTE to begin revising the PBA tasks for the upcoming year. Please participate in your work session if you are able to attend the conference. A schedule of work sessions for continued task and rubric development will be released early in the fall semester.
 
I look forward to working with you to create authentic assessments that aid classroom instruction and lead to the development of high-quality products that showcase our students' content-specific knowledge, skills, and creativity. Please email, call, or submit a  Help Desk ticket to me if you have any questions related to your PBA.

Thank you for all you do for our students! 

Mike Adam
Project Manager
Key Contacts
Assessment Manager ............................
IAD Meetings and Training Events.........
National Certification .............................
Research and Standard Setting/PBA.....

Have assessment needs not addressed in this issue?
Create a Help Desk ticket, and we'll get right on it! 

662.325.2510 | rcu.msstate.edu
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