Statewide testing with college admissions exams dates to 2001, when Colorado and Illinois introduced the practice. Such testing expanded in subsequent years, and beginning in 2017--2018, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allowed states to use a college admissions exam to meet accountability requirements for high schools. Some see this option…

There has been a steady increase in college enrollment rates in recent decades, which has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in graduation rates. If this discrepancy is partly due to insufficient effort exerted by students, policies that aim at rewarding effort explicitly may succeed in increasing graduation rates. A unique and rich…

Critical to many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career paths is mathematical modeling--specifically, the creation and adaptation of mathematical models to solve problems in complex settings. Conventional standardized measures of mathematics achievement are not structured to directly assess this type of mathematical…

This report is designed to provide a detailed picture of the relationship between students' performance in the middle grades (grades five through eight) and their subsequent performance in high school and college among students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The key findings of this report have been summarized in briefs for middle grade and…

There is a very large population of students who struggle with the transition from the middle grades to high school, raising concerns that high school failures are partially a function of poor middle grade preparation. As a result, middle grade practitioners are grappling with questions about what skills students need to succeed in high school,…

The relative strengths and predictive relationships among three cognitive measures (ACT subscores, preprofessional grade point average, and Allied Health Professions Admission Test subscores) and first-year academic success in allied health curricula were examined. Methodology is described and findings presented. Preprofessional grades generally…

This study was conducted to relate personal, cognitive, and school variables to physics achievement. The sample consisted of 435 students participating in the 1985 Mississippi State University Annual Physics Competition. The Student Background Questionnaire was planned and developed to collect information on each variable examined. The predictor…

In 1987 the Ohio State Board of Education adopted new requirements for teacher education and teacher certification. This included the implementation of competency testing in Ohio, using the National Teacher Examination (NTE) as the certification examination. Correlation and regression analyses were performed on data collected between 1982 and 1989…

This paper presents the latest in a series of studies examining school district report cards for their usefulness planning and implementing school improvement. The 1992-93 Arkansas report cards were studied. These were similar to the report cards from Tennessee that were the subject of the initial study in that they used and reported a…