WIDA Consortium
| Established | 2002 |
|---|---|
| Location | , Wisconsin , |
| Website | wida |
The WIDA Consortium (formerly World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment) is an educational consortium of state departments of education. Currently, 42 U.S. states and the District of Columbia participate in the WIDA Consortium, as well as the Northern Mariana Islands, the United States Virgin Islands, Palau, the Bureau of Indian Education, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. WIDA designs and implements proficiency standards and assessment for grade K-12 students who are English-language learners, as well as a set of proficiency standards and assessments for Spanish language learners. WIDA also provides professional development to educators and conducts research on instructional practices.
WIDA was established in 2003 with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for the purpose of creating English language proficiency standards and assessments. The purpose of such Enhanced Assessment Grants is to support State activities designed to improve the quality, validity, and reliability of state academic assessments beyond the requirements for such assessments described in section 111(b)(3) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The consortium originally began with Wisconsin, Delaware, and Arkansas, which were the sources of the acronym WIDA, although Arkansas dropped out. The acronym definitions ("Wisconsin-Delaware-Arkansas" and the acronym developed to match the new constituent states, "World Class Instructional Design and Assessment") are no longer used.
In addition to its consortium member state partners, the WIDA project partners with the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C., and MetriTech, Inc. of Champaign, IL, and most recently, Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), Maple Grove, MN.
The WIDA Consortium administrative office is located in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
The language standards used by WIDA consortium member state department of education are referred to as the English Language Development (ELD) Standards Framework.