Accreditation & Testing

The premier diagnostic tool for school improvement.

COGNIA is the largest community of education professionals in the world. We are a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts rigorous, on-site external reviews of PreK-12 schools and school systems to ensure that all learners realize their full potential. While our expertise is grounded in more than a hundred years of work in school accreditation, COGNIA is far from a typical accrediting agency. Our goal isn’t to certify that schools are good enough. Rather, our commitment is to help schools improve.

Combining the knowledge and expertise of a research institute, the skills of a management consulting firm and the passion of a grassroots movement for educational change, we serve as a trusted partner to 32,000 schools and school systems—employing more than four million educators and enrolling more than 20 million students—across the United States and 70 other nations. COGNIA was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI)—and expanded through the addition of the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) in 2011.

The Renaissance Assessment is a computer adaptive assessment that is administered three times a year to identify your child’s learning and progress so that the instruction process meets your child’s needs.  Teachers will have the tools to track student learning and provide re-teaching as may be needed to ensure that all students are on the right path toward progress.

A computer adaptive test continually adjusts the difficulty of test items to the student responses using a vast bank of test items as it progresses.  Instead of each student taking an identical test each student takes a test that adapts to his or her strengths and areas needed for continued learning.  If a child answers a question correctly, the difficulty level of the next item is increased.  If the child misses a question, the difficulty level is decreased.  The Computer-Adaptive Tests (CATS) save testing time and can spare children the frustration of items that are too difficult.  On average, students can complete the STAR Math assessment and STAR Reading assessment in 30-40 minutes.  Reading and Math students are presented with questions that are tailored to a student’s response - making each assessment individualized.

Keep in mind that standardized assessments constitute but one measure of student growth. Ongoing formative assessment by the teacher through the course of the year provides an indicator of day-to-day progress which is most valuable.