States are increasingly interested in including measures of student achievement growth, or "value- added," in evaluating teachers. Annual state assessments, however, which are the typical measure of student growth, usually cover only reading and math teachers and only in grades 4-8. These state assessments thus cannot …

States and school districts are exploring alternatives to state tests for measuring teachers' contributions to student learning. One approach applies statistical value-added methods to alternative student assessments such as commercially available tests and end-of course tests. The evidence suggests that these methods can reliably distinguish…

Various applications of item response theory often require linking to achieve a common scale for item parameter estimates obtained from different groups. This article used a simulation to examine the relative performance of four different item response theory (IRT) linking procedures in a random groups equating design: concurrent calibration with…

After surveying 1,827 students in their final year at eighty randomly selected two-year and four-year public and private institutions, American Institutes for Research (2006) reported that approximately 30 percent of students in two-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in four-year institutions have only basic quantitative…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how and why Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) has developed a system aiming to effectively place students in freshman and developmental English programs. The placement system includes: triangulating data from external test scores, with scores from a panel-marked hand-written essay (HWE),…