National Conference on Student Assessment
June 23-25, 2025
This week, an exciting conference is taking place in the world of student assessments: the National Conference on Student Assessment. Today, we wanted to share a bit about this conference and, for those who will be attending, let you know when the Education Data Center will be presenting - we’d love to meet you!
Background on the NCSA
The National Conference on Student Assessment (NCSA) is an annual conference hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). As many readers will know, the CCSSO is a national nonprofit that aims to bring state education leaders together to learn from one another across wide-ranging topics facing their districts and students.
CCSSO explains that the NCSA is an annual opportunity for “for those interested in sharing reflections, best practices, strategies, research studies, resources, and innovative methods to measure student learning and support districts and schools to ensure the educational progress of all students. This conference gathers the most dynamic and creative education professionals from around the country for an intensive, highly collaborative exploration of new technologies, best practices, and pressing issues.”
NCSA 2025
The conference theme this year is Maximizing Impact: Leveraging Assessment and Accountability to Drive Student Learning, and will take place in Denver, Colorado. Specific areas of focus include:
Innovative Assessment Approaches
Data Interpretation and Use
Assessments for Special Populations
Accountability Systems
State-District Partnerships
Communication and Stakeholder Engagement
School Improvement
The speakers attending the NCSA this year cover a remarkable array of experiences and extensive expertise across SEAs, research organizations, assessment developers, school districts, and more.
Education Data Center
We are proud to share that the EDC will be hosting a session on Wednesday, June 25, from 12:15-1pm: Toward Clear & Comprehensive Public Assessment Data Reporting Practices: Recommendations from Building the State Assessment Data Repository.
The session will discuss the development of the State Assessment Data Repository and the process of compiling data from state summative assessments across all 50 states and DC. The process helped illuminate variations across SEAs in data reporting across school years and subjects: differences in data availability across data levels (state, district, school), across student demographic groups, in how states disaggregate data by achievement level, and more. We hope to share some of the lessons we have learned from working with all SEA assessment data files and to offer suggestions for ways in which SEAs can continue to work toward clear and comprehensive data reporting.
Our team is immensely grateful for SEA feedback and insight to help us understand changes in state assessments over time, and for the diligent data teams that work to help fulfill our data requests. Their expertise and collaboration are tremendous!
If you or your colleagues will be at the NCSA this week, please do not hesitate to reach out! You can let us know at info@eddatacenter.org. EDC leadership - Emily Oster and Clare Halloran - would love to meet you!