As many as 75 Hawaii Department of Education schools over the next few months will be piloting a new online system that assesses whether students are on track to graduate from high school, attend college and enter the workforce, according to a DOE press release.

The system, created by the federally supported Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, measures student progress toward college and career readiness.

The assessment system is aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy and math for grades three through 11. The HIDOE expects to launch it statewide in the 2014 school year, the press release says. 

The pilot will allow the system’s creators to evaluate how Smarter Balanced works in the real world. Over the next 18 months they will continue to develop additional tasks and refine the test engine. 

Here are some examples of performance tasks seen on the assessment: English language arts/literacy and math.

Hawaii DOE Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said that the assessment will measure critical thinking and problem solving. It will also provide valuable data for stakeholders, she said.

The pilot will run over the course of seven two-week windows between now and late May. Pilot participation is voluntary. Schools whose data will not be used in the pilot results can participate through an online survey. Participating schools will not receive student scores nor use the test to replace other statewide assessments, the press release says. 

— Alia Wong