CSAP Item Maps

The Unit of Student Assessment develops Item Maps following the administration of each CSAP assessment each year.

Purpose of Item Maps
The item maps contain information that may be of some assistance examining a school or districts adopted curricular alignment to the state standards. They are not an instructional tool, and cannot be used to develop curriculum.

Please refer to the Standards for Educational and Psychological testing relative to the ethical and appropriate use of assessment data, including item maps.

How to Use Item Maps
Item maps are linked to a specific form and year of the test. They are useful in a broader sense of ensuring curricular and or programmatic alignment to the standards and benchmarks assessed on that particular form of the assessment.

Use item maps in conjunction with student performance data to ask questions about a district’s adopted curriculum and program of instruction.
For District and School administration:
   Is this benchmark included in key concepts within your adopted district curriculum?
For Teachers:
     Is this benchmark taught within the larger scope of concepts included in the district adopted curriculum?
     How have I assessed this concept?
     Can students demonstrate understanding of these broader concepts contained within the benchmarks and standards in a variety of ways?
To Examine curricular alignment:
     How are the varying levels of DOK reflected in curriculum and instruction?
     Classroom/school/district level – adopted curricular inventory

Cautions
Item maps must not be used to create yearly instructional targets. Please keep in mind that objectives are assessed on a cyclical basis, and item focused instruction based on item map information is not only ineffective, it is an unethical use of the information provided.

Item Number:
Indicates the actual item number within the test booklet. If an item # is missing, one of two things could be true:
1. Reading/Writing tests - Writing contains Item #s 1 and 2, then Reading contains #3 and so on. If an item # is missing from either Reading or Writing, it may be found in the other content area.

2. A missing item may have been suppressed. An item is suppressed, or removed from the calculations, if it is recognized as not operational as a quality measure of the assessment objective. Any suppressed items are not used in calculations of student scores.

Order of Difficulty:
Indicates the level of difficulty based on actual student performance. It may be thought of this way: more actual students answered correctly items at the lowest level of difficulty and fewer actual students answer correctly the items at the highest level of difficulty.

Test Session:
Indicates the session in which the item was located.
For example: G3 MA S1 is Grade 3, Math, Session 1

Item Type:
MC = Multiple Choice
SCR = Short Constructed Response
CR = Constructed Response
ECR = Extended Constructed Response (Writing CSAP only)

Points for Item:
1 of ' x' means that 1 point out of 'x' possible points for constructed response items. Example: 1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3. The first time the item occurs in the list indicates the scale location of 67 percent of students scoring 1 point on that item; the second time indicates the scale location of 67 percent of students scoring 2 points on that item, and so on.

See Content Rubrics: http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/csap/csap_scoring.html

DOK (Depth of Knowledge)
Indicates the Depth of Knowledge (complexity) the item requires of students. This is not item difficulty.

(See Depth of Knowledge on CDE website:
http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/csap/csap_plds.html#DOK).

Note: The DOK level is assigned to each ITEM and not to each score point. This means that an item may have one point that requires a low complexity, but has an overall DOK level that is high level because there are score points requiring more complex skills.

Subcontent Areas
Items are developed to measure each Assessment Objective within a Standard. Following test construction, each item is reviewed for their alignment to subcontent areas. Subcontent areas are required to have a minimum of ten points on each test. Given the small number of points assigned within each subcontent area, the standard error of measurement is too large to accurately diagnose an individual student need, but may be used to point educators in the direction of need for more in-depth diagnostic assessments to be used at the school and classroom level. These areas are provided to enable districts and schools to further diagnose the needs at a curricular or program level where large numbers of students will reduce the standard error of measurement.

Subcontent area information is available in the GRT layout file on the CDE website in the CSAP Fact Sheets.

Benchmark:
Indicates the Assessment Objective the item is measuring. In Writing, the Extended and Paragraph Writing may be assigned a Standard rather than a single Assessment Objective.

Links to Item Maps by Assessment Year:

2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998