USNS 2024 Updates

Thank You

A very sincere thanks to the entire community of USNS educators and for your efforts to improve instruction and math learning for all your students. Your passion, caring, and expertise is inspiring, and is what inspires and informs this project’s continual improvement efforts.

Many of you shared feedback and corrections with our team. We listened to this feedback and incorporated your suggestions in this newest version of the assessment guide, released in July 2024.

July 2024 Updates

If you have already printed copies of the USNS guide for fall 2024, please note that no additional questions were added, and none of the tasks were deleted or changed in any significant way.

Find a full list of updates below:

• The D Tasks have renamed as Fluency Tasks for the sake of clarity. The digital delivery of those tasks, launched during the COVID pandemic, was a temporary solution to support remote instruction and is no longer supported.
• The language on the grade 4 Fall assessment question 9 was changed to elaborate the context of the problem, eliminating linguistic confusion related to the units involved. The question now asks students where water stations should be placed if they want to put them after ⅓ and ⅔ miles. This helps to eliminate confusion around the units. While it is not anticipated that this will cause much if any changes to the results, it is hoped that it will alleviate some concerns of teachers around the students’ understanding of the question.
• Question 2 on the grade 3 Spring assessment was modified to include a level zero. This was added for students unable to solve 300-2, a scaffold provided for students who do not initially solve 300-102 correctly.
• Commentaries were added for the grade 3 midyear written tasks.
• Formatting was improved.
• Additional clarifying language was added to a select number of rubrics.

If you have questions related to this latest version of the USNS assessments, please connect with screeners@forefront.education.