This past spring, more than 92,000 Hawai'i public school students in grades 3 through 8 and in grade 10 took the new Hawai'i State Assessment test to determine how well they are meeting the state's academic standards — the Hawai'i Content and Performance Standards III.

This is the second year that grades 4, 6 and 7 were incorporated into the statewide results.

STATEWIDE AVERAGES

Each year these scores, released yesterday by the state Department of Education, give a broad overview of how Hawai'i students taking the state assessment performed. This year's results showed gains in math by every grade and gains in reading by every grade except fourth. Tenth-graders had the best overall results in reading, ahead of their performance last year by 22 percentage points.

ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS

Each year, these test results demonstrate how well schools meet mandated goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools that repeatedly fail to meet goals are faced with wholesale restructuring, meaning they could be taken over by an outside authority and staff could be removed.

Hawai'i students and schools showed gains this year. With improvement in both reading and math scores, 60 percent of the state's public schools met their goals. That's almost double the 35 percent of schools that met goals last year.

Those percentages mean that 170 schools out of 282 met goals, compared with 100 a year ago.

INDIVIDUAL RESULTS

Parents of public school students will receive individualized assessments of their children's strengths and challenges — and suggestions about how they can help — when the latest individual scores go home in the coming weeks as school resumes for the fall. As with all tests, educators advise that this is only one way to measure your child's success. Parents should also consider teacher evaluations and day-to-day homework to determine how well their child is doing in school.

This year, students also took a new national test called the Terra Nova to compare their progress to students across the country. Because this is a different test than the Stanford Achievement Test students took last year, it's difficult to measure progress between the years. However, about 75 percent of Hawai'i students in every grade tested scored average or above average on the test.