State and Federal Law
Test
Administration
Accountability Through the Ages
Test
Development
Acronyms
100

This 1965 act was the first major federal law to fund primary and secondary education, aiming to close the achievement gap.

What is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)?

100

This is the previously-required order of administration for content area assessments.

What is ELA, mathematics, science, and social studies?

100

This 2001 act reauthorized the ESEA and introduced measures to hold schools accountable for student outcomes, including standardized testing.

What is No Child Left Behind (NCLB)?

100

This is a type of test that adjusts the level of difficulty based on the test taker's responses to prior questions.

What is a computer adaptive test (CAT)?

100

ALD

What is an Achievement Level Descriptor?

200

This is the federally-required process that ensures state assessment systems meet statutory requirements and are technically sound.

What is assessment peer review?

200

This refers to results, data, or findings of summary or aggregated data not being shared publicly until a certain date.

What is embargoed?

200

This term refers to the measure used under NCLB to determine if schools were meeting state academic standards.

What is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)?

200

This is the process used to set cut scores for a test.

What is standard setting?

200

GKIDS

What is the Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills?

300

These are the assessments required by state law, but not by federal law.

What are grade 5 social studies and high school social studies?

300

This is a designation indicating that a testing anomaly occurred that warrants reporting and coding of the anomaly and nullifying of student scores.

What is an invalidation?

300

This 2015 act replaced NCLB and gave more flexibility to states while maintaining accountability for student performance.

What is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)?

300

This is the process used to set scoring guidelines for constructed response items.

What is rangefinding?

300

FAPE

What is a Free Appropriate Public Education?
400

This is a federal law that affords parents the right to have access to their children’s education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information from the education records.

What is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)?

400

This is a change in a test administration that alters how a student takes or responds to the assessment.

What is an accommodation?

400

These are the three required types of school identification under ESSA.

What are Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI), and Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI)?

400

This is a controversial, yet often used, measure of cognitive complexity.

What is Depth of Knowledge (DOK)?

400

O.C.G.A.

What is the Official Code of Georgia Annotated?
500

This is the section of the main federal education law that identifies assessment requirements.

What is 1111(b)(2)?

500

These are three of the five designated purposes of each EOC administered.

What are completion of course, make-up from a previous administration, retest, test-out, and validation of credit?

500

ESSA mandates that states must intervene in schools where this rate falls below 67%.

What is graduation rate?

500

According to federal law (and monitored through peer review), state assessment systems must align to this for each grade that is being assessed.

What is the depth and breadth of the state's academic content standards?

500

AA-AAAS

What is an Alternate Assessment based on Alternate Academic Achievement Standards?