Iowa Assessments Information

The week of March 31st, Des Moines students in grades 3 through 11 will take the Iowa Assessments (formerly known as the ITBS or ITEDS).

The main purposes of the Iowa Assessments are to provide the school with information that can be used to improve instruction and to help teachers make sound educational decisions about each student’s learning. The scores allow teachers to check each student’s year-to-year growth and to identify some of each student’s strong areas of achievement and needed areas of improvement. Students should be encouraged to do their best on the Iowa Assessments, as they should for all of their school activities.

The Iowa Assessments cover many of the fundamental skills students are learning in school in the areas of reading, mathematics, and science. Teachers, counselors, and administrators use the results to monitor students’ learning of some of the important skills taught in school. Scores from tests like the Iowa Assessments cannot replace a teacher’s observations and judgments, but they can provide useful supplementary information for the teacher, the parent, and the student. When test results are used in conjunction with other information from both the classroom and the home, teachers and parents can work together to identify and address the educational needs of each student.

Your student’s scores on the Iowa Assessments can be used to:

  • understand how your student performs in key areas such as reading, writing, math, science and social studies
  • help identify your student’s relative strengths and limitations in these key areas
  • monitor your student’s performance over time
  • compare your student’s performance to other students in the nation
  • provide information about your student’s proficiency level as defined by the state of Iowa
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