If paying for biannual achievement testing is not in your budget (as it is not for most people), one thing you could try is using your state's curriculum frameworks as a checklist of grade-expectations for mastering skills. Or if you are in one of the states that has adopted Common Core, you could use that the same way. You would have to survey your child's skills yourself, of course, but it would give you a better sense of how they line up against various grade levels. And how they are progressing through the curricular expectations.
I have not obtained any useful information from group standardized testing for several years, and will be switching to out of level testing with the ACT or SAT (most likely the former), with at least one of mine.
