LM3

No. French immersion students do not participate Nova Scotia Assessment: Reading and Writing in Grade 3.

No. Students with an Individual Program Plan (IPP) in English language arts in place as of the first day of the assessment are not eligible to participate in this assessment. The assessment booklets for such students must be returned to the Department of Education with documentation inserted inside the front cover of the assessment booklet (i.e., a photocopy of only the front page of the IPP), and the back cover of the student's booklet should be completed. Students for whom an IPP in English language arts is in development are expected to participate in the assessment.

Measures are taken to ensure that Nova Scotia assessments are reliable, valid, and fair to students. By embedding assessment items from one year’s assessment in the following year’s assessment, the department is able to make a genuine comparison of student performance on those common items, independent of the overall difficulty of the assessments. Making the assessment secure allows the Department of Education to use these common items to equate forms year-over-year, and allows the department to perform longitudinal studies of student performance.

The Nova Scotia assessments are secure forms and must not be copied or shared. Therefore, only students enrolled in the grade level of a particular assessment will write the assessment, which means alternate arrangements are required for other students in combined classes during the administration of the assessment. Students with an Individual Program Plan (IPP) in English language arts or mathematics will not write that subject area’s portion of the assessment. Copies of assessments will not be provided for the teacher’s use. Every copy of the assessment sent to the school must be returned to the Department of Education. No part of the assessment, including student work, is to be copied or shared.