Iowa Tests of Educational Development

The Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) are a set of standardized tests given annually to high school students in many schools in the United States, covering Grades 9 to 12. The tests were created by the University of Iowa's College of Education in 1942, as part of a program to develop a series of nationally accepted standardized achievement tests. The primary goal of the ITED is to provide information to assist educators in improving teaching.

Rather than testing a student's content knowledge, the ITED endeavors to evaluate students' skills in a variety of areas, especially based on problem solving and critical analysis of texts. These are considered by the authors of the ITED to be skills acquired across multiple curricular areas and skills that are important for academic success. Within the skill areas evaluated by the ITED, the test is designed to elicit information about a student's current skill level, growth and abilities within each area tested. The ITED is designed to examine and compare a student's ability in several educational fields, including vocabulary, reading comprehension, language, spelling, mathematical concepts and problem solving, computation, analysis of social studies materials, analysis of science materials, and use of sources. Although the test is broken up into these fields, the goal of the ITED is to track the development of the skills and analysis needed in each of these areas rather than the content.

The vocabulary section of the ITED focuses on testing the development of students' vocabulary for everyday communication.

The reading comprehension section of the ITED tests literal understanding as well as the higher-level skills of inference and analysis.

The language section of the ITED focuses on students' ability to revise and edit texts, include issues of style and clarity as well as grammatical errors.

The ITED spelling test presents students with groups of words; students must indicate which word is misspelled or whether they are all spelled correctly.

This section focuses on problem solving and logical thinking skills rather than mathematical computation. Some questions require basic computation while others require students to determine the steps necessary to solve a problem without actually completing the problem itself.

...
Wikipedia