📉 WIDA Assessments from the 25/26 School Year

During the 25/26 school year, WIDA released updates to their ACCESS assessments. These updates, described in the linked article on their site, include the following statements:

• “You will get score reports on your regular reporting timeline.”
• “You can use 25/26 ACCESS scores to make decisions about students for the 26/27 school year — either to exit students or to decide on classroom placement.”
• “You should treat 25/26 ACCESS scale scores as a new baseline to measure growth against (you can’t compare scale scores from previous years).”
• “You should use 25/26 ACCESS proficiency level scores with caution prior to the ACCESS Standard Setting 2026 event as they will reflect the old proficiency level cut scores.”

This information presented a number of complications regarding the Assessment Test records in Homeroom Connect for displaying WIDA score data.  The 25/26 Scale Scores are not supposed to be compared to the Scale Scores from prior years, but the Proficiency Level scores were determined using old cut score methods rather than new cut score methods. The Proficiency Level scores are also being used by districts to make decisions about students, despite the assessment scoring undergoing a period of change. 
 

Since the original Proficiency Level scores are being used for decision-making, those will be kept in Homeroom Connect as the default WIDA ACCESS assessment scores for the 25/26 school year. Assessment scores from 25/26 and prior will be marked as “Thru (25/26)” to communicate that the assessments changed afterwards. Although the Scale Scores are still not recommended for comparison to years prior to 25/26, we felt that labeling them differently in the application would cause unnecessary confusion. 
 

• WIDA Assessments from the 25_26 School Year.pdf100 KB