Contact: Anthony de Bruyn, (512) 499-4363

Date: May 20, 2005

UT System News Release

45,000 Students Start on the Right TRACK

One in four 11th graders across the state logged on to the University of Texas System's free exit-level TAKS test readiness website this year. Final results from this year's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests will be announced soon, but the TEA recently stated that more than 89 percent of the class of 2005 had passed the TAKS in its first year.

The UT System site, TAKS Readiness and Core Knowledge (TRACK), received more than 3.7 million hits from 12,000 individual students in the one week prior to the final TAKS administration in April 2005. Since January, more than 45,000 students used TRACK taking more than 70,000 sample tests and exploring the vast array of dynamic learning tutorials.

Beginning in 2004, the state's 230,000 11th graders were required pass the rigorous TAKS exit test to graduate from high school. To help students and teachers prepare, the UT TeleCampus (UTTC) and the Office of Academic Affairs at UT System designed and delivered an interactive website with more than 600 learning tutorials and sample diagnostics in the subject areas tested.

"UT TeleCampus' role is to create access and opportunity for students of all ages via online learning, so this project was a great fit for our strengths and expertise," said Dr. Darcy Hardy, UTTC director and assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs at UT System. "We're grateful to the Houston Endowment and the Meadows Foundation for the funding that allowed us to build and offer this resource. We plan to spend the next several months enhancing TRACK, adding more diagnostic test items and additional learning tutorials."

The site is offered free to Texans, thanks to generous funding from the Houston Endowment and the Meadows Foundation, along with operational support from the UT System.

Students, and in many cases, teachers using TRACK in the classroom, enter the TRACK website and may take auto-scoring diagnostics in any of the four subject areas tested on the TAKS. UTTC designed the testing engine to store test scores then direct students to the appropriate learning materials based on their performance on various student expectations and objectives. Students may leave and return to the site as often as they like, all the while tracking and retaining scores and notes of which learning objectives they have mastered.

Rich and poor counties statewide had high TRACK usage. The county with the highest usage was Harris County (with Houston ISD) as more than 6,500 students in the county used TRACK this year. One of the poorest counties in the state (and listed among the 100 poorest counties in the U.S. based on per capita income) is Cameron County. Cameron had the seventh highest usage by county with more than 2,000 student users.

Student-created demographics (while anonymous by name) indicate that 38 percent of TRACK users were Hispanic, 37 percent Anglo/White, 18 percent African American and 7 percent "other" ethnic group.

While most students identified English as the language spoken most frequently at home (81 percent), 16 percent said Spanish was the language spoken most frequently at home. Another three percent chose "other" indicating a third language at home.

Most students using TRACK accessed it prior to taking their first TAKS test with 82 percent saying they had not yet taken the test at the time they entered TRACK. Twelve percent had taken the test once and six percent had taken the test more than once.

Males and females used TRACK fairly evenly with 53 percent identifying as female and 47 percent as male.

The subject diagnostic most frequented in the TRACK site was science with 28,555 tests started and more than 14,600 completed.

Not all students using TRACK are concerned about simply passing the TAKS. Some students use the TRACK program to further hone their skills and improve their content knowledge in hopes of achieving the commendation given to students achieving very high test scores.

"Last year, I challenged a few of my good students to achieve commendation on the TAKS Math Exam," said Dalip Sondhi, Math Chair at Houston's Eastwood Academy Charter High School. "They had all missed commendation the year before and I was concerned they would miss the goal again. So I asked them to work independently with TRACK. Sure enough, after the results came out, all of the Track students had delivered commendations. I expect similar results this year, in a few weeks as a matter of fact."

TRACK website

UT TeleCampus