APPALACHIAN AND RURAL STUDENT PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES ON KENTUCKY’S EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT:

Originally, only three grades were tested for the purposes of accountability: 4, 8, and 12.1 W ith the 1996-97 assessment, the number of grades tested expanded to five (4, 5, 7, 8, and 11) to shorten the length of the assessment for students at the lower grades. Moreover, KIRIS itself was reformed and replaced with the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) after the 1997-98 school year. To keep the analysis from becoming too complex, only Cycle 2 data is included in the analysis