The acronym stands for Obtaining Necessary Parity through Academic Rigor.

An ELL is an English Language Learner, a student identified as having a limited proficiency in English. The ELL population in US schools reached 5 million in 2004, and continues to grow.

ONPAR benefits ELLs by enabling them to demonstrate the scientific and mathematical knowledge they have attained and the related skills they have mastered. ONPAR provides ELLs with this opportunity by reducing the linguistic demands content area test questions impose upon them. The combination of universal design concepts, rich contextual and graphic support, and reduced linguistic complexity allows test takers to demonstrate academic achievement not in spite of linguistic challenges, but because linguistic challenges have been either eliminated or significantly reduced.

A reliable, valid, and fair assessment like ONPAR enables educators and states to evaluate more accurately the content knowledge and skills of ELLs still in the early stages of English language development. ONPAR encourages administrators and teachers to adopt challenging content-based approaches for ELLs, approaches aligned with assessed skills and academic content. The comparability of ONPAR ensures that, when ELLs reach a threshold of English Language Proficiency (ELP), they will be able to transition smoothly from ONPAR to the regular English-based state tests. Once ONPAR is incorporated into its assessment system, a state will be able to more equitably and meaningfully include ELLs in its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) calculations. ONPAR will thus lead to increased participation rates of the ELL subgroup in assessment, more reliable and valid data on the academic achievement of ELLs, and a closing of the achievement gap on state assessments between ELLs and their English-proficient peers.

ONPAR combines elements of  many theories and practices—simplified English, universal design, performance-based assessments, enhanced graphic support, multiple measures of assessment, and multiple response formats for selected response items—into a single assessment battery. The test is delivered in a Web-based format, which, while not new, is still considered an innovation in large-scale test delivery, scoring, and reporting. ONPAR employs item formats and response types that draw on the multiple modalities that computer-based testing allows. Test takers respond to audio, visual and text-based prompts by completing matching, ordering and estimation tasks (among others) that go well beyond the standard multiple choice. ONPAR is also unique in its target population: to date, no measures of achievement across the content areas and anchored in state academic content standards have been exclusively designed for and piloted, field-tested, and validated on ELLs.

ONPAR is a stand-alone measure of academic achievement. It can, however, serve as one of multiple measures schools and states deploy as they strive to assess the academic achievement of their ELL populations in a meaningful way.

Care has been taken in the development of the ONPAR assessment to preserve the cognitive and content demands of test questions even while reducing the associated language load. Alignment studies, cognitive labs, qualitative studies and pilot tests conducted at intervals throughout the test development process ensure that ONPAR achieves comparability with existing state achievement measures in breadth, depth, range and balance of required knowledge and skills. ONPAR comparability is defined in terms of three criteria: (a) the alignment of ONPAR with state standards and assessment frameworks; (b) the technical or psychometric qualities of the measures; and (c) comparability to regular state large-scale tests.

At the heart of the ONPAR project is the question of how a large-scale academic assessment specifically designed for beginning ELLs can attain cognitive rigor comparable to that of regular state assessments and yield valid and reliable results.

To make a compelling argument for the comparability of its test, the ONPAR team has designed and implemented studies able to produce quantifiable evidence that ONPAR is measuring the same content as state tests in a particular content area for a particular grade. While drawing on existing work, these studies go beyond traditional assessment comparisons.

In the process of developing a workable assessment of ELL achievement in science and math, ONPAR is exploring the links between English language proficiency (ELP) and academic achievement among ELLs. Also under investigation is the appropriateness of a test like ONPAR for the assessment of the academic achievement of students with learning disabilities.

ONPAR may prove useful in assessing the academic achievement of native English speakers for whom text-based tests are inappropriate. This population includes students with processing, physical, or learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia).

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