The IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards: What “Aligned” Actually Means
You have seen the phrase on a hundred course pages. Aligned to the IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards. Sometimes it is IDA-aligned, sometimes KPS-based, sometimes just informed by the science of reading. It reads like a credential, and for most practitioners it functions like one: proof that the training you are about to pay for is the real thing.
Here is the problem with treating it that way. The IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards are a content framework, not a credential, and four separate objects in this field get called "the IDA standards" in ordinary conversation: a published document, an examination built from it, an accreditation that reviews programmes against it, and a certification that requires both. The International Dyslexia Association owns three of those four. It certifies nobody.
That distinction is not pedantry. It decides whether the course you finish this spring makes you eligible for certification, or leaves you assembling a portfolio in a three-month application window next year. And the part that actually binds you is not the alignment claim at all. It is a grid of class years on a table you have probably never opened.
Four different things get called "the IDA standards"
Untangling them takes one paragraph each, and everything else in this article follows from getting them straight.
The document. The Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading, published by IDA. It describes what a teacher of reading should know and be able to do. It confers nothing on anyone.
The examination. The Knowledge and Practice Examination for Effective Reading Instruction, or KPEERI, which tests knowledge of the content the document describes. IDA owns and regulates it.
The accreditation. IDA reviews teacher-preparation programmes against the standards and accredits them at defined levels. The unit of accreditation is the programme, not the person.
The certification. The Center for Effective Reading Instruction issues credentials to individuals: Structured Literacy Classroom Teacher, Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist, Structured Literacy Dyslexia Specialist. CERI is where the letters after your name come from.
If you are new to how these acronyms sit against each other, our map of the educational therapist, learning specialist and executive-function coach roles is the orientation piece, and what the learning specialist title does and does not carry covers the neighbouring credential landscape.
So "IDA certified" is not a thing, and IDA's own certification page says as much: certifications "are offered through organizations such as the Center for Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) and other recognized certifying bodies."
This is the same move the field pulls with Orton-Gillingham, where the label turns out to be a claim nobody adjudicates. The difference is that here somebody does adjudicate — just not the thing you thought.
The document exists in two editions, and they are not built the same way
This is the finding that undoes the shorthand. There is no single artefact called the KPS.
The first edition was adopted by IDA's Board of Directors in the autumn of 2010, prepared by the Professional Standards and Practices Committee under Louisa Moats as chair. It is organised as Section I, a content framework lettered A through F, followed by Section II, guidelines on supervised practice.
A copy is still in public circulation through Connecticut's State Education Resource Center, carrying the line "©2010, by The International Dyslexia Association® (IDA)."
The second edition, dated 2018, is organised completely differently. It has five numbered Standards, and each is laid out in columns that set knowledge expectations beside "Examples of Coursework Expectations" and "Examples of Practicum or Fieldwork Expectations." A copy is hosted by IDA's Oregon branch under the title "Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading Second Edition: 2018."
Two editions, eight years apart, with different structures, different numbering and a different theory of how the standards should be used. A course page that says "aligned to the KPS" has not told you which one.
Both are live inside the accreditation system. IDA's own Program Review and Accreditation Handbook reviews programmes against the 2018 standards and supplies a crosswalk between the 2010 and 2018 versions for programmes previously aligned to the older edition. That crosswalk exists because it had to.
No third edition appeared on IDA's published pages as of 28 September 2026, and no revision was announced on them. That is a statement about what is published, not a claim that none is in progress.
What the five 2018 standards actually cover
The second edition's structure is worth knowing because it is the shape of every accredited syllabus and every KPEERI content outline downstream of it.
Standard 1 — Foundations of Literacy Acquisition
Standard 2 — Knowledge of Diverse Reading Profiles, Including Dyslexia
Standard 3 — Assessment
Standard 4 — Structured Literacy Instruction, subdivided A through G
Standard 5 — Professional Dispositions and Practices
The document is deliberately catholic about who it applies to: "The term teacher is used throughout this document to refer to any person whose responsibilities include reading instruction," across classroom, remedial and clinical settings. It is not a specialist document that classroom teachers may borrow. It was written for both.
And it names its own intended uses, which is the sentence to have in mind whenever you read an alignment claim. The standards may be used for educator preparation programme accreditation, educator certification, course design and sequencing, delineation of fieldwork requirements and observation checklists, and as a content framework for developing licensing or certification examinations.
Note what is not on that list. Marketing.
The 2010 edition's practicum rule is the one nobody quotes
Section II of the first edition sets out supervised-practice expectations at two levels, and its language is startling next to everything that came after.
Level I individuals are described as practitioners with basic knowledge who "demonstrate proficiency to instruct individuals with a documented reading disability or dyslexia," implement a programme with fidelity, and formulate and implement a lesson plan. Level II individuals are specialists who "may work in private practice settings, clinics, or schools" and who "implement and adapt research-based programs to meet the needs of individuals."
To reach either level, the candidate completes a practicum with one to three well-matched students who have a documented reading disability, under a recognised certified instructor providing consistent oversight and observations — and here is the clause:
"the practicum continues until expected proficiency is reached."
No hour count. No session count. No months. The 2010 standards specify a terminal condition rather than a quantity, and they add that documentation of proficiency must be completed during full, not partial, lesson observations, at various intervals throughout the instructional period.
Set that beside what the six bodies in our survey of supervised-hours requirements actually publish — hours, hours-plus-demonstrations, sessions, lessons, months — and the 2010 KPS looks less like an outlier and more like a rebuke. It is the only document in this area that declines to convert proficiency into a number.
The exam is IDA's. The certification is not.
The KPEERI is the gate, and it is precisely documented, which makes a pleasant change.
It is "formerly the Certification Examination for Effective Reading Instruction (CEERI)," per CERI's exam page — so if you sat this exam some years ago under a different acronym, it is the same gate.
The exam was developed under the guidance of Applied Measurement Professionals with the input of 1,200 educators. It is computer-based, 110 multiple-choice questions, with a two-hour limit, and its items are weighted Recall 34 per cent, Application 48 per cent, Analysis 18 per cent.
Scoring is scaled. A candidate's raw score converts to a scaled score between 200 and 800, and the cut score is 500. CERI compares the method to the SAT and the Praxis exams.
Ownership and delivery are split, and the split matters when something goes wrong. The exam is "owned, regulated, and administered by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA)," while delivery and score reporting run through Meazure Learning.
CERI's FAQ sends every content and application question to IDA directly, and points candidates preparing for it at the free Reading Rockets Reading 101 modules alongside IDA's own KPEERI exam information.
The operational detail most likely to cost somebody a year: your Score Report is retrievable from the score portal for one year from your exam date, and after that, per CERI's own page, "your Score Report will no longer be recoverable and you will need to retake the exam to obtain a new report."
Certification applications require documentary proof of a passing score. Download the report the week you sit the exam and keep it somewhere you will still have in five years.
CERI certifies, IDA accredits, and neither one trains you
CERI is explicit about the boundary: application and exam access are open "to anyone who meets the required criteria regardless of geographical location. However, please note that CERI does not provide training or professional development courses."
That separation of training from certifying is the same structural argument the Orton-Gillingham Academy makes for its own model, where the Academy certifies and accredits while Fellows do the training. It is a real integrity feature and worth recognising when a body builds it in.
Note also the hedge in CERI's own description of what its certification rests on. Structured Literacy education, it says, "is based primarily on the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (KPS) which were developed by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA)." Primarily, not wholly. The standards are the backbone, not the entirety.
And there is a fourth use of the document that nobody advertises: the KPS is also a continuing-education taxonomy. To renew a CERI certification you submit a CEU log, and that log "must indicate which of the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (KPS) a particular CEU was related to."
Ten contact hours renews for one year; thirty or more renews for three. If you are already tracking CEUs across several bodies — and the units do not convert between them — this one has to be tagged by standard, not just counted.
Accreditation has two tiers, and the practicum is the line
IDA's accreditation handbook, updated 8 December 2025 on its own cover page, sets two tiers with a clean division between them.
Accreditation requires a minimum of 45 clock hours of curriculum and prepares candidates for general-education classroom teaching and small-group instruction. It does not cover specialised one-to-one remedial intervention. The curriculum must align with the standards sufficiently for candidates to pass the KPEERI.
Accreditation PLUS comes in two tracks. The interventionist track requires a minimum of 90 hours — the 45 core hours plus 45 focused on word recognition. The specialist track requires a minimum of 135 hours, adding a further 45 on comprehension and writing.
Both require a supervised Structured Literacy practicum with one to three students over multiple weeks, two to three sessions weekly, three formal observations, and a portfolio carrying pre- and post-assessment data and progress monitoring.
The practicum is the dividing line between the two tiers, exactly as it is at ALTA, at the Academy and at CERI. Across this entire field, the thing that separates a classroom credential from an intervention credential is whether somebody watched you teach.
Accreditation runs for a fixed term: "All programs are accredited for a period of 5 Years from the date of the decision letter," with reaccreditation beginning in year four. Universities, colleges and independent training programmes may all apply.
The handbook is also careful about what accreditation claims, and the sentence deserves quoting whole rather than paraphrasing: "Although accreditation does not guarantee every graduate's success as a professional, it does confirm that each candidate has mastered a defined set of skills and abilities according to the accreditation criteria."
That is a claim about a syllabus and an assessment regime. It is not a claim about you.
The register is a grid of class years, and that is the part that binds you
Here is the sentence in CERI's FAQ that almost nobody reads before enrolling, and that determines whether your training counts:
To apply using a standard application "you must first have completed either a recognized University Program or Independent Teacher Training Program that qualifies its graduates for that level of certification during a year that it was accredited for that level."
Not a programme that is accredited. A programme that was accredited, at the level you want, in the calendar year you finished. Eligibility is pinned to your class year.
CERI publishes exactly that, and it is a grid. Its two register pages — accredited independent teacher training programmes and accredited university programmes, both marked "Updated December 30, 2025" — list each programme as a row of year columns from 2012 to 2025, with the CERI level or levels its graduates qualify for entered in each year it held accreditation.
Read the rows and a sharp asymmetry appears. We parsed both tables as published on 28 September 2026.
The independent register lists 71 programmes across 45 organisations, and 67 of the 71 carry an entry in the 2025 column. Only four stop earlier.
The university register lists 64 programmes across 41 institutions, and only 35 carry an entry for 2025. For the other 29, the most recent accredited class year is 2019 for four programmes, 2020 for four, 2022 for eighteen, and 2023 for three.
So on the university side of this system, a little under half of the listed programmes show no accredited class year after 2024, while on the independent side almost every listed programme is current. If you are choosing between a graduate certificate and an independent training provider, that is a material difference, and it is invisible unless you open the table.
How to read a row without over-reading it
Two cautions, because the table repays care.
The "Reaccreditation Due" column does not tell you whether a programme is current. Sixteen of the independent programmes carry a due date already in the past and nonetheless show an entry in the 2025 column. The due-date field and the class-year columns disagree often enough that the class-year row is the one to trust.
And a gap in the table is a statement about the table. The honest form is the bounded one: as of the register CERI published on 30 December 2025, no accredited class year after 2022 is listed for a given programme at a given level.
That is not the same as saying the programme lost its accreditation, and it is certainly not a judgement about its quality. Several institutions on that list run well-regarded programmes.
What it does mean is practical and immediate. If you finished in 2024 or 2025 at a programme whose last listed class year is 2022, the standard application route is not open to you on the strength of that completion. You will need the alternate route instead.
Ask the programme's registrar, in writing, which CERI levels your specific class year qualifies for, and confirm the answer against the published register before you enrol. Nobody will volunteer this.
If your class year is not on the table, the alternate route is a calendar problem
CERI publishes a second path for practitioners who did not complete an accredited programme in a qualifying year, and it has an unusual constraint.
The alternate route is available for the Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist and Structured Literacy Dyslexia Specialist certifications. It "requires more rigorous documentation of an applicant's teaching experience using Structured Literacy based methods," assembled as a portfolio: a personal statement, a résumé or curriculum vitae, letters of support from colleagues and parents, and case studies of students.
Then the constraint. "Alternate Route applications are only accepted between July 1st and September 30th of each year." One three-month window, annually. Miss it and the wait is not a few weeks.
The KPEERI is required either way. The same is true of an upgrade from SLCT or SLDI to a higher level: you can upgrade on the strength of a later accredited programme completion, or by alternate route, and both demand a prior passing score on the exam.
Who is actually on the register, and who is on it without saying so
The independent register is the more interesting of the two documents, because it shows how much of this field routes through a single table.
Bodies whose own credentials appear there include the Orton-Gillingham Academy at all four levels, from Classroom Educator to Fellow; Academic Language Therapy Associates at CALP and CALT; the Wilson Reading System at Level I and Level II; NILD at Level III; Neuhaus Education Center; the Institute for Multisensory Education; Brainspring; Keys to Literacy; Landmark Outreach; Literacy How; Lexia; and 95% Group, among others.
If you have read our comparisons of reading intervention programmes or structured literacy training routes, most of those names will be familiar.
Three features of the list are worth flagging.
It nests. One row on the independent register reads "Programs accredited by the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC)," broken into Category: Teaching and Category: Therapy.
So IMSLEC accreditation is recognised as a block rather than programme by programme, which means "accredited by two bodies" can describe one decision rather than two independent reviews. The same nesting turns up on IDA's other accreditation lists.
Public agencies are on it. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction appears with a programme called Reading Research to Classroom Practice, and Texas's Region 4 Education Service Center appears with Reading By Design.
A state agency and a regional service centre sit on the same register as the commercial providers, which is a fact about the register rather than about any law. Nothing here is legal advice. Questions about what your own state requires of you belong with your state education agency, and questions about independent practice belong with an attorney.
University routes into educational therapy run on a separate track. The programmes AET recognises for its own membership ladder, such as the post-master's certificate at CSUN, are approved against AET's requirements rather than against the KPS, and appearing on one list implies nothing about the other.
If the credential you are working toward is AET's, the Associate to ET/P to BCET ladder is the sequence that governs you, and AET's own Fact Sheet is the scope document to read alongside it.
And one entry is aimed somewhere almost nothing else is. Valley Speech Language and Learning Center appears with "WELLS – Structured Literacy for English Learners" — as far as the register shows, the only listed programme whose title names multilingual learners at all.
The claim and the register do not always match up the way you would expect
Two providers make the point neatly, and they fail in opposite directions.
IMSE states plainly that it "offers two certification programs aligned with the International Dyslexia Association's Knowledge and Practice Standards (IDA-KPS)" and markets an "IDA-Accredited Pathway." IMSE is on the register. The claim checks out, and a provider whose marketing language survives a check against the primary source deserves to be named for it.
Lexia is also on the register, with LETRS and Aspire Professional Learning listed. Yet on Lexia's own LETRS page, as read on 28 September 2026, the Knowledge and Practice Standards are not mentioned at all. The alignment language that half the field leans on is absent from the page of a provider entitled to use it.
That reversal is the tell. The presence or absence of the phrase on a course page carries almost no information. It is not audited, not registered, and not defined. The register is audited. Read the register.
"Aligned to the KPS" is not the same claim as "accredited"
Pull the two apart and you can see how much work the vaguer phrase is doing.
Accredited means a named body reviewed a named programme against a named edition of a published document, at a defined level, for a five-year term, and published the result in a table you can open. It is checkable in about ninety seconds.
Aligned means whatever the person writing the sentence intends it to mean. No body issues alignment. No register lists it. The handbook does not address programmes that claim alignment without holding accreditation, and there is no published mechanism through which such a claim is reviewed.
This is structurally identical to what we found with the phrase "Orton-Gillingham based": a real and meaningful body of practice, a vocabulary shared across the field, and no adjudicator.
So replace the question. Instead of asking a provider whether their course is aligned to the KPS, ask three things:
Which edition? The 2010 first edition or the 2018 second edition.
Are you on CERI's register, and for which class years and which levels? Then check the answer against the published table yourself.
If I complete this course in this calendar year, which CERI certification does my completion qualify me for by the standard route? Get it in writing.
A provider who can answer all three in a sentence is telling you something. A provider who cannot is telling you something too.
The KPS is not the only standards document in the room
It is easy, inside the structured-literacy world, to assume the KPS is the field's only preparation standard. It is not, and the comparison is instructive because the other two bodies made opposite moves.
The International Literacy Association publishes Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals, 2017 Edition, covering nine professional roles grouped into five categories — specialised literacy professionals, classroom teachers, principals, teacher educators and literacy partners — across seven standards including a dedicated practicum and clinical-experience standard.
Dyslexia and structured literacy are not named in the framing of its public overview page, which is a statement about that page rather than about the document's full contents. The 2017 revision was written about at the time in the peer-reviewed literature, including Bean and colleagues on preparing reading and literacy specialists.
The Council for Exceptional Children went the other way. Its Specialty Sets, which "delineate the essential knowledge and skills that beginning special education professionals must possess," include a Special Education Learning Disabilities Specialist set, and an initial Learning Disabilities set now archived.
CEC's own page states that the revised 2020 Initial K-12 Standards "do not require a program to be informed by or aligned to a specialty set but will continue to maintain them as a program resource," and that programmes should transition to standards "which no longer require alignment to, or use of, the specialty sets."
So during the years when alignment to the KPS became a near-universal marketing claim, the largest special-education body in the country was making alignment to its own specialty sets optional. The field's appetite for alignment language and the professional bodies' appetite for requiring it have been moving in opposite directions.
The Reading League occupies a third position, and the cleanest one. Its Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines, now in a third edition, evaluate curricula rather than teachers, and the League publishes named Curriculum Navigation Reports on specific commercial programmes.
That is adjudication of a specific claim about a specific product, published under the evaluator's name. It is the thing the alignment claim has never had — applied to a different object.
What the research record says about any of this
Almost nothing, and it is worth being exact about the shape of the gap.
No study locating an effect of KPS alignment, or of IDA accreditation, on student reading outcomes was found as of 28 September 2026. That is an absence in the published record rather than evidence of ineffectiveness, and the distinction is not a formality. The two are constantly confused in this field.
The same discipline governs the category above it. The What Works Clearinghouse's intervention report on unbranded Orton-Gillingham-based strategies identified 31 studies and found that none met its evidence standards, concluding in its full report that "the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of unbranded Orton-Gillingham-based strategies." Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and truncating it after the word effectiveness reverses its meaning.
And the most recent meta-analysis in the area, Stevens and colleagues in Exceptional Children, found effect sizes of 0.22 for foundational skills and 0.14 for vocabulary and comprehension, neither statistically significant, while stating in terms: "The findings from this meta-analysis do not definitively prove that OG interventions are not impactful for students with dyslexia.
In addition, we are not suggesting that other reading programs are more effective than OG. Instead, findings from this meta-analysis indicate that we do not yet know the answers to these questions." The full text is free.
The federal practice guidance points the same way. IES practice guide 29 on reading interventions in grades 4 to 9 makes recommendations about instructional practices and states that "Any references within the document to specific education products are illustrative and do not imply endorsement." The NCII tools charts likewise rate instruments and programmes, not the standards documents behind them.
What the standards genuinely are, then, is a professional consensus about content, assembled by named people, published openly, and used to build syllabi and an examination. That is a real contribution.
It is not an outcome claim, nobody involved says it is, and our broader look at what the evidence record holds on educational therapy found the same pattern across the field: the evidence attaches to components, not to the labels stacked on top of them.
The same held for math intervention, where the strongest evidence document in the area contains neither of the two words the field uses most.
When several organisations share a vocabulary, check whether they share a meaning
This is the ninth time we have run the same check on this site, and it has never once come back clean. The pattern is worth stating explicitly, because once you have it you can apply it yourself to the next confident phrase somebody sells you.
A qualification letter on a test publisher's product page is a purchasing rule for one storefront, not an industry scale — WPS runs A, B, C, N with C in the middle, and Riverside uses no letters at all.
A continuing-education hour means ten contact hours to one body and one clock hour to another, so CEUs do not convert across the credentials you hold.
"Supervised hours" mostly means hours you spent teaching while somebody else was formally responsible for you, and six bodies count it in six different units.
"Orton-Gillingham based" is a claim no organisation adjudicates, and the programme with the strongest personal lineage to Samuel Orton makes the fewest claims to the brand.
Executive function appears in five professional bodies' documents in five structurally different genres, and only one of them puts it inside a scope of practice.
Dosage in a published programme specification is a fidelity requirement, not a minimum effective dose, and the same clearinghouse publishes two definitions of it.
A grade equivalent is printed by every major battery and disowned, to varying degrees, by the publishers printing it.
"Written expression" names a score on three major batteries and no two of them are built from the same subtests.
And dyscalculia is not the name of anything you can score, by the admission of the body that considered using it as a diagnostic label.
"Aligned to the Knowledge and Practice Standards" belongs on that list. The standards are real, published, openly authored and genuinely useful. The claim about them is none of those things until you check the register.
A sequence, not a decision
We will not tell you which training to take. But the order of operations is the same for everyone, and doing it out of order is what produces the expensive surprises.
Decide which CERI level you are actually aiming at — classroom teacher, interventionist or specialist. They differ in coursework hours and in whether a supervised practicum is required at all.
Open the register that matches your route, independent or university, and find the programmes that list your target level.
Check the class-year column for the year you would finish, not for the current year.
Ask the provider in writing which level your completion year qualifies for, and whether their accreditation is under reaccreditation review.
Confirm which edition of the standards their curriculum maps to, and whether their practicum meets the Accreditation PLUS conditions if you need them.
Sit the KPEERI when your coursework is fresh, and file the score report permanently.
If your class year does not qualify, put the July-to-September alternate-route window in your calendar a year out and start assembling case studies now.
None of this tells you whether a given programme teaches well. For that, the questions are about observation, feedback and who watches you teach, which is the ground we covered in what supervised hours actually mean across six bodies — and the answer there was that the observation count, not the hour count, is where the quality signal lives.
Two further things sit outside the standards entirely and are worth separating from them. Standard 3 covers assessment knowledge, but holding a structured-literacy certification does not change which instruments a storefront will sell you or what you may do with a report somebody else wrote: those are governed by publisher qualification levels and by the line between administering and interpreting.
And the systems you will use to show that your teaching worked are a separate decision again, covered in our comparison of progress monitoring tools and, for writing specifically, in our map of dysgraphia and writing intervention tools.
Where the published record runs out
Five things could not be established from the published sources, and a post like this is more useful if it says so plainly rather than filling the gaps with confident sentences.
Whether a third edition of the standards is in preparation. No announcement appears on IDA's public pages as of 28 September 2026. The absence of news is not news.
Whether a past "Reaccreditation Due" date means a programme's accreditation has lapsed. The register's own columns contradict that reading in sixteen independent cases, and CERI does not publish a key explaining the field. Ask CERI directly if the answer matters to your application.
Exam and accreditation fees. Not published on the pages reviewed, and in any case the fastest-staling figure in this whole area. We do not print fees for that reason.
KPEERI pass rates, and the standard-setting study behind the cut score of 500. The scaling method is described; the psychometric report is not public.
One oddity worth knowing about before you rely on IDA's own landing pages. The page IDA publishes on the standards still describes the 2010 Board adoption and refers to an examination IDA "is developing" to certify individuals at the document's levels. That exam has existed for years, under two names, and the certification is issued by CERI rather than by IDA.
Read the handbook and CERI's pages for current mechanics, and treat the landing page as history. Small organisations' web pages go stale faster than the practices they describe, which is a lesson this site has had to apply to its own published claims more than once.
Also worth one sentence and no more: CERI writes Structured Literacy™ with a trademark symbol on its exam page, while the 2018 standards document uses the term throughout without one. We note the difference in usage and draw no conclusion from it. This is not a trademark opinion.
Frequently asked questions
Is there such a thing as IDA certification?
No. IDA accredits teacher-preparation programmes and owns the KPEERI examination. Individual certifications — Structured Literacy Classroom Teacher, Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist and Structured Literacy Dyslexia Specialist — are issued by the Center for Effective Reading Instruction. IDA's own certification page directs individuals to CERI and other certifying bodies.
Which edition of the Knowledge and Practice Standards is current?
IDA's Program Review and Accreditation Handbook reviews programmes against the 2018 second edition and provides a crosswalk from the 2010 first edition for previously aligned programmes. The 2010 edition remains in public circulation through third-party sites. No later edition was found on IDA's published pages as of 28 September 2026.
Does a course that says it is “aligned to the KPS” qualify me for CERI certification?
Not by itself. The standard application route requires completion of a programme that held IDA accreditation at your target certification level in the calendar year you completed it, plus a passing KPEERI score. Alignment is an unaudited claim; accreditation for your class year is a published fact. Check the register.
What is on the KPEERI exam and what score do I need?
The exam is 110 multiple-choice questions with a two-hour limit, weighted 34 per cent recall, 48 per cent application and 18 per cent analysis. Raw scores convert to a scaled score between 200 and 800, and the cut score is 500. It is owned and regulated by IDA and delivered through Meazure Learning.
What happens if my programme was not accredited in the year I finished?
You can apply by alternate route for the Interventionist or Specialist certifications, submitting a portfolio with a personal statement, curriculum vitae, letters of support from colleagues and parents, and student case studies. Alternate route applications are accepted only between 1 July and 30 September each year, so plan around that window.
How do CERI certifications get renewed?
By submitting a renewal application with a completed CEU log and certificates of attendance. Ten contact hours renews for one year; thirty or more renews for three years. The log must record which of the Knowledge and Practice Standards each CEU related to, so tag your professional development as you earn it rather than reconstructing it later.
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