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 will be a multi-year, fully online pilot that launches 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.

Benefits of the Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot

TEA will pilot the following grade levels and subjects during school year 2022-2023. 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

More than 130 Texas public school districts and open-enrollment charter schools have volunteered to participate in TTAP. Participation in the pilot is optional and does not eliminate the obligation to administer STAAR. Districts who participate in the through-year pilot during school year 2022-23 will experience the following benefits:

• Receive TEKS-aligned progress monitoring data, including information about in-year growth. Student results on the fall and winter opportunities will be available at the conclusion of each opportunity window and will provide a snapshot of where students stand academically at that point of the year.
• Participate in teacher assessment literacy training. Training on how to interpret through-year progress monitoring reports and on the roles of interim, formative, summative tests within a balanced assessment system will be provided to educators so that they can use data to best support students.
• Interact with operational new question types. TTAP participants will be able to interact with the new question types that will be used on the redesigned STAAR in Spring 2023. The new, non-multiple-choice question types are more closely aligned to the types of questions educators are using in the classroom every day.
• Increase familiarity with STAAR online testing platform. All TTAP progress monitoring opportunities will be administered on the same online platform as STAAR, giving students additional opportunities to interact with the system’s functionalities.

Texas Through-year Assessment Pilot Resources

• TTAP FAQs (PDF updated 6/14/22)
• TTAP Informational Webinar 
  • TTAP Informational Webinar Recording
  • TTAP Informational Webinar Slides 
• TTAP Orientation Webinar
  • Recording can be accessed by pilot participants in the LMS starting mid-June 
• TTAP District Participation