The use of pretests can help document student gain, along with the observations and measurements conducted directly by the instructor and other local district staff. The window for winter pretesting is January 2nd through February 1st, 2019. As a reminder, students must take the posttest on or before April 26th, 2019, to receive a student gain calculation, which LEA must report to the state by June 14th, 2019.

Posttests and field tests will still be available during the winter pretest window so it is important to activate the correct test.

To learn more about the pretests offered by WebXam, please follow the link below:

Three Cybersecurity End-of-Course item banks were posted for field testing at the beginning of December, in order to finalize them at the end of the school year with the other four pathways in the Career Field. The pathway designation is N4 and the WebXam Code is 85MD. The course titles are Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity Defense & Reinforcement, and Cybersecurity Testing & Response. For more info, like subject and assessment codes, see the link below.

Starting December 14th, 2018, teachers and administrators will be required to specify the District/Career Center that owns or runs the program of which the test is a part. This will be related to test activation and will be the second step in the activation wizard. The activation wizard will default to the teacher’s profile location but can be changed to any district or Career Center in the area. Administrators at Career Centers that run programs at satellite schools should assist teachers in making the correct selections. This is being done to improve the accuracy of End of Year Reporting.

Thirty-seven new pathway practice tests have been posted for use by both teachers and students. These practice tests, each with 20 items, represent a sample from all the end-of-course item banks. There are items from all courses included in the pathway. Please note that none of these items are included on the pretest or post-test - their purpose is to simulate the experience of the post-tests.

If you are a teacher in the Engineering & Manufacturing career fields, WE NEED YOU! We are looking for subject-matter-experts (SMEs) in these two career fields for the item-writing workshops in 2018-19. If you're interested in participating, please visit http://go.osu.edu/EM-item-writing and complete our registration survey. It’s not too late to sign up and you can play a key role in student success.

Test blueprints are now available for almost all tests at the WebXam About the Tests page. Prior to 2015-16, a different method was used; starting that year, test blueprints were reviewed by the subject-matter experts at the beginning of the item-writing process and were used to determine the percentage of items written to each outcome. In both cases, however, the blueprints reflect the structure of the item bank at the strand-outcome level. Percentages on the blueprint are approximate, and do not reflect the exact percentage of items from each standard that are on the test. Blueprints are important because they allow teachers to build classroom activities around the course outlines knowing the distribution of the test items to the outcomes.

WebXam Teacher Review workshops allow career-technical education instructors a formal opportunity to review-rate and comment on finalized WebXam tests (once per cycle of 4-5 years). Teacher Reviews are held in Columbus, Ohio, throughout the school year. More information, including cost and registration, can be found at the link below. The next review will be held January 14th, 2019 at CETE.