WIDA Products and Services
Many WIDA products and services are available to anyone for free, and others can be purchased by non-members. The following points clarify which products and services are connected to Consortium membership:
- When new member states join WIDA, it can purchase an alignment study between the WIDA ELD Standards and its academic content standards. It is highly recommended that new states adopt the large scale/summative WIDA ELP Standards but they may keep their prior standards as companion documents. WIDA also offers alignment services to non-members.
- ACCESS for ELLs is the Consortium's large-scale assessment that meets all requirements of NCLB for testing and reporting of English proficiency. This assessment is only available through consortium membership, and is a secure test. MetriTech, Inc. in Urbana, Illinois prints, distributes, scores, and reports on ACCESS for ELLs, and is the sole vendor authorize to conduct these operations.
- WIDA received an enhanced assessment grant in 2008 to develop a performance-based version of the Alternate ACCESS for ELLs test which will measure language progress of students who cannot meaningfully participate in ACCESS for ELLs. This test will be available to Consortium members only beginning in March of 2012.
- The W-APT (WIIDA ACCESS Placement Test) can be downloaded as a series of PDF files by WIDA Consortium members at no cost. It allows teachers to obtain a quick proficiency level score for new arrivals at any time of year to help determine program eligibility and placement. It is also useful to help assign students to a tier for ACCESS for ELLs. Master copies of the W-APT are available for sale to non-consortium members according to the number of students to be tested annually in the purchasing school or district, but can only be downloaded for free by members.
- WIDA offers both on-line and site-based professional development. Each member state is granted a certain number of free face-to-face professional development days annually (based on its number of ELLs), but extra days can be purchased and carried over from year to year if unused. Professional development may also be purchased by non-consortium members.
- WIDA provides assessment and accountability research services to support states in understanding, evaluating, and improving programs that support ELLs. The WIDA Consortium has a Research Subcommittee of the Consortium Board that sets the annual research agenda for WIDA's research team. The research team also conducts fee-for-service projects on specific research questions requested by member states. To support states, the WIDA research team manages a comprehensive longitudinally-based, data warehouse system comprising ACCESS for ELLs assessment information and data from several national collections (Common Core Dataset, Schools and Staffing Survey, and NAEP). An on-line comprehensive data dashboard drawn from WIDA's data warehouse is provided to states to support their ELL educational programs.