The Oregon Department of Education introduced the new Oregon Statewide Assessment System (OSAS) in 2018-2019.
While we remain strong partners with our Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia, the Next Generation Science Standards Collaborative, and the ELPA21 Consortium, our statewide assessments are customized for Oregon. ODE defines the blueprints that our assessments adhere to and how our assessments are administered. Oregon teachers are involved in all possible aspects of test development, as well, including item development, item reviews, scoring rubric validation, and validation studies. In short, our assessment system is “Oregonized” in order to meet the needs and values of our constituents. Related to this understanding, we will not be using vendor labels in our discussions about the statewide assessments in our technical documentation or discussions about our assessments.
We’re also at the end of our use of our historical Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS) assessments. Science is a new assessment, and Social Sciences is transitioning to a performance-assessment-based system in 2019-20. You will no longer see our assessments referenced with an OAKS label for this reason.
Our regulations refer to our statewide assessment system as just that, Oregon’s Statewide Assessment System. We’ll be using that general descriptor and the OSAS abbreviation moving forward.