WIDA Consortium | |
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Established | 2002 |
Location | Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. |
Website | www.wida.us |
The WIDA Consortium (World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment - WIDA) is a not-for-profit educational consortium of state departments of education. WIDA designs and implements proficiency standards and equitable educational opportunities for grade K-12 students who are English language learners. WIDA also provides professional development to educators and conducts research on instructional practices and the results and use of English language proficiency assessments.
WIDA was established in 2002 with a $2.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for the purpose of creating English language proficiency standards and assessments. The purpose of such Enhanced Assessment Grants is to support State activities designed to improve the quality, validity, and reliability of State academic assessments beyond the requirements for such assessments described in section 111(b)(3) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Approximately 840,000 English language learners in 23 states and the District of Columbia will be tested in the 2009-2010 school year with WIDA’s standards-aligned, large-scale assessment of English language proficiency, ACCESS for ELLs. This test has been administered annually in WIDA member states beginning in the 2005-06 academic year. Since August 2006, consortium member states have used the WIDA-ACCESS Placement Test to assess students' English language proficiency upon their arrival in a new district or school.
The WIDA MODEL for Kindergarten assessment is used in the U.S. and several other countries as a test of English language proficiency for 4- to 6-year-old students.
In addition to its consortium member state partners, the WIDA project partners with the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C. and MetriTech, Inc. of Champaign, IL. Finally, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assists in aligning WIDA English Language Proficiency Standards with states’ academic content standards.
The WIDA Consortium administrative office moved in 2006 from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.