Welcome to the Georgia Center for Assessment!
Our major activities involve contracts with the Georgia Department of Education to support Writing Assessment, the High School Graduation Test (HSGT), CRCT-M, Gwinnett High School Gateway, and GKIDS (Kindergarten Assessment). Writing assessments are given in grades three, five, eight, and eleven; the Grade 11 test is a requirement for high school graduation.
To assist Georgia school districts in preparing their students for these tests, we provide Supplementary Writing Assessments at the Elementary, Middle, and High School levels, and in-service assessment and instructional workshops. We also offer a Predictor Test for the High School Graduation Tests in Science and Social Studies. Click here for more detailed information on GCA services available to all Georgia School Districts.
Writing Assessment
The Georgia Center for Assessment, as the contractor for The Georgia Department of Education, facilitated Core Development Teams, Advisory Committees, Benchmarking Committees, Bias Review Committees, and Standard Setting Committees for grades 5, 8, and 11 writing. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated (O.C.G.A.) requires that writing assessments be administered to students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 11. GCA provides over 750,000 independent ratings on writing samples each year. Our goal is to create developmentally appropriate assessment procedures to enhance statewide instruction and student performance in the language arts.
Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests – Modified (CRCT-M)
The Georgia Center for Assessment, as contractor for The Georgia Department of Education, helped to develop the CRCT-M, a grade-level alternate assessment designed for students who receive special education services and who meet specific eligibility criteria. Georgia has created the CRCT-M as an avenue for students who struggle, due to their disability, to demonstrate grade-level proficiency in the same time-frame as their peers. Items on the CRCT-M have been enhanced to increase the accessibility for eligible students, allowing them to demonstrate more consistently what they know and can do. The CRCT-M assesses the same grade-level Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) as the general Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). The CRCT-M is available in the content areas of reading, English language arts, and mathematics in grades 3 through 8.
Gwinnett County Public Schools High School Gateway
The High School Gateway assesses students’ language arts, science, and social studies knowledge and skills. Students write one essay on a science topic and one essay on a social studies topic. All students must pass the Gateway Assessment to earn a regular Gwinnett County high school diploma. The tests are scored by the Georgia Center for Assessment. All raters have been specially trained to score the Gateway responses for science and social studies. At least two raters independently read each paper and analyze each student’s knowledge and skills in four domains of science writing (Development of Scientific Processes, Expression of Scientific Knowledge, Organization of Scientific Concepts, and Conventions) and social studies writing (Development, Analysis, and Interpretation; Expression of Social Studies Knowledge, Organization of Social Studies Concepts, and Conventions).
The Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS)
The Georgia Center of Assessment, as a contractor, developed GKIDS with The Georgia Department of Education. The goal of this observational assessment is to provide teachers with information about the level of instructional support needed by individual students entering kindergarten and first grade. There are seven areas or domains of learning that are assessed as part of GKIDS. Four of these domains (ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies) are based on and aligned to the Georgia Performance Standards for kindergarten. There are also three non-academic domains that contribute to a student’s readiness for first grade (Approaches to Learning, Personal and Social Development, and Motor Skills). GKIDS will allow teachers to assess student performance during instruction, record student performance in an on-line database, and generate reports for instructional planning, progress reports, report cards, SST, and/or parent conferences.
We also provide research and measurement services to many individual school systems (eg Gwinnet County Schools, Cherokee County Schools, Clayton County Schools, Cobb County Schools, Dekalb County Schools, Fulton County Schools, Clarke County Schools, etc.) and education agencies such as the Southern Regional Education Board and the Georgia Department of Education.
Additional Clients Served include:
- The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement
- Regional Educational Service Agencies
- The University of Georgia
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- US Department of Forestry
- US Navy Supply Corps School
- Department of Natural Resources
- South Carolina Office of School Quality
Several of our projects have generated technical reports and research papers. A selection of these in Portable Document Format (.PDF) is located here.