Student participation similar to last year

CMAS tests are offered to children in grades 3 to 8. Children who score at least 750 on the exams are considered to have “met or exceeded expectations,” a sign that they are on the path to being college or career ready, according to the education department.

The tests cover math and English Language Arts. Schools also give tests in science, but fewer students take those exams. High schoolers take the PSAT and SAT.

This year’s CMAS results offer a second year of data on how children in third to eighth grade perform in math and English Language Arts compared to pre-pandemic years.

The state canceled testing in 2020 because the rapid spread of the coronavirus forced schools to close and move to remote learning.

The next year many children opted out of the tests, which were also not given to every grade level so

some educators questioned whether the data was useful and Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest district, disregarded the results altogether.

Student participation in CMAS tests this year was similar to that in 2022. Still, fewer students took the tests than in 2019. RELATED:

More than 92% of thirdgraders, fourth-graders and fifth-graders took the math and English Language Arts tests this year. By comparison, at least 96% of the students in those grades took the tests four years ago.

A smaller percentage of middle schoolers took the tests compared to younger students, with participation ranging from 79% to 89.9%. That’s down from a participation range of 88.7% to 94.9% in 2019, according to the education department.

occurred in math, with the percentage of seventh-graders who “met or exceeded expectations” dropping 5.3 points from 2019, according to the education department.

Students are rebounding more consistently in math than in English language arts, according to the agency. Fifth- and sixthgraders did almost as well in English language arts as students in 2019, with the percentage of pupils who tested as proficient down by less than 1 percentage point compared to four years ago, the data shows.

Overall, 47.8% of fifthgraders and 43.4% of sixthgraders “met or exceeded expectation” this year, according to the data.

Students in grades 4 and 8 saw the largest declines — more than 4 percentage points — over the fouryear period, with 43.8% and 42.4% of pupils, respectively, meeting or exceeding expectations in literacy.

The education department said it has invested about $6.7 million in ESSER — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief — money into tutoring, summer and after-school programs, and math curriculum through September

2024.