The purpose of New Jersey's statewide assessments is to measure what students at specific grade levels know and are able to do. The Language Arts Literacy components of the state's fourth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade assessments focus on students' skills in using language to construct meaning through text.  The five language arts literacy standards and 104 progress indicators that illustrate the standards inform the knowledge and skills that are assessed by the ESPA, GEPA, and HSPA, as well as the philosophy inherent in the design of the assessment experience.

Development of the language arts literacy section of the ESPA, GEPA, and HSPA began with the premise that assessment is integral to curriculum and, inversely, curriculum is integral to assessment. Good assessment is a means for students to learn about a topic - to ask questions, to speculate, to explore new ideas, and to form tentative opinions - and it should provoke their curiosity.  Only when that curiosity is engaged can assessment accurately reflect the knowledge and skills that students have access to and can draw on in their everyday lives and in school.

Through good assessment, too, students should be able to recognize their strengths and challenges as learners. Meaningful reflection on these is essential to the individual's growth and development, and it should be an outcome of any assessment. It is the hope of the language arts literacy committees that as students experience the New Jersey ESPA, GEPA, and HSPA, they will experience the rewards of thinking, learning, communicating, and aesthetic expression.