Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

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…

The effects of students taking different levels of the same standardized achievement test were assessed by administering two levels of the same test to each student. The functional level of the test was taken by all students. The second level of testing was randomly assigned at the adjacent higher or lower level of the test. Functional level…

When used appropriately, standardized assessments can assist education reform by tracking individual or group progress and achievement levels and indicating college readiness. Credibility and validity can be improved by preventing student exclusions, using multiple indicators, stressing year-to-year performance, monitoring consequences, and…

This study compared the reliability and validity of two different measures of reading ability, the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Reading test and the ITBS Vocabulary test. The data consisted of scores of 377 grade 5 and grade 6 students on these tests, along with their assigned reading levels in the…

The authors argue that personnel who select standardized achievement tests have been led to believe that the major achievement test batteries differ very little in terms of the topics they test; but that the content covered by these major tests is different, and that such differences have consequences for instructional content. To test this…

Factor analysis was used to summarize the interrelationships between a large and varied collection of measures. Data for 500 third grade students assigned to either an experimental or a comparison condition were obtained. The data covered scores for the first 28 items of the Student Affective Behavior Checklist, (2) 9 nonmathematics subtests of…

Old Order Amish are readily distinguishable from others in society by their dissociation from "modern" convenience and dress. Students in an Old Order Amish school in Iowa receive instruction in language arts from a secular basal language arts workbook, and a basal reader containing biblical stories. Comprehension of content is evaluated…

This study attempts to determine the extent to which performance on educational tests is dependent upon language proficiency. Three questions are involved: (1) Will the dictation and the cloze tests prove to be as successful in distinguishing degrees of proficiency among native speakers as among second language learners? (2) How well will scores…