The School District of Philadelphia implemented a universal K-12 interim assessments program beginning in the 2020-21 school year. All schools across the District administered aimswebPlus for grades K-5 and Star for grades 6-12; reading and math tests were administered for both assessments. AimswebPlus Reading and Math tests were administered in three testing windows and Star Reading and Star Math tests were given in four testing windows.  Due to Covid-19 mitigation efforts in Philadelphia, most of the interim tests were administered virtually during the 2020-21 school year.

The overall goals of this analysis were: (1) to examine whether there are patterns of nonparticipation during the spring assessment window that can provide additional information when interpreting 2020-21 performance and (2) to discover whether there are ways to support increased participation in the 2021-22 testing windows.

Key findings include:

• 20% of eligible students did not participate in either aimswebPlus test and 30% of eligible students did not participate in either Star test in the spring 2020-21 window.
• Forty-one percent of the students who did not take the reading tests and 45% of the students who did not take the math tests in spring 2020-21 were also not tested in fall 2020-21.
• The number of students who were not tested in spring 2020-21 varied by assessment, which were administered by K-5 and 6-12 grade bands. It ranged from 715 Kindergarten students who were not tested for aimswebPlus Reading to 5,617 twelfth-grade students who were not tested for Star Math.
• Students who were not tested in spring 2020-21 were more likely to be in higher grade levels. For example, only 8% of spring non-tested students for Star Math were in grade 6 but 21% were in grade 12.
• While there were some disproportionalities, students who were not tested in spring 2020-21 were from all student demographic groups.