The Florida Department of Education (FDOE) identified increasing the graduation rate of students with disabilities and decreasing the graduation gap between students with disabilities and all students as its state-identified measurable result (SIMR). To make progress toward the SIMR, the state sought to build the capacity of local education…

This is an abridged version of the full assessment framework, written for a general audience. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as The Nation's Report Card, informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States. Report cards communicate the findings of…

Trend estimation in international comparative large-scale assessments relies on measurement invariance between countries. However, cross-national differential item functioning (DIF) has been repeatedly documented. We ran a simulation study using national item parameters, which required trends to be computed separately for each country, to compare…

Public school critics often point to rising expenditures and relatively flat test scores to justify their school reform agendas. The claims are flawed because their analyses fail to account for the difference in data types between dollars (ratio) and test scores (interval). A cost-benefit analysis using dollars as a common metric for both costs…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

Educators in forty-five states and the District of Columbia are hard at work interpreting and implementing the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (CCSSI 2010). This work typically involves teacher participation in professional development activities focused on developing an understanding of the content standards as well as the…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

Video games have become a popular medium in our society, and recent scholarship suggests that games can support substantial learning. This study stems from a project in which we created a video game enabling students to use biotechnology to solve a societal problem. As students engaged in the game, they necessarily interacted with the underlying…

The commentary (1) uses the U. S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as a prototype for examining standardized reading achievement tests at the item level, and (2) sketches an alternative based on an initiative underway in the United Kingdom.

Statistics courses for prospective teachers are being developed in response to recent K-12 curriculum recommendations. As these courses are developed, it is important to design accompanying assessments. This manuscript describes a strategy for assessing aspects of statistical knowledge for teaching. The strategy involves analyzing and responding…

What do you do with the student who says she hates history, yet watches The History Channel every night? What do you do with the student who is underachieving in social science but has visited every battlefield in Virginia? Our curriculum frameworks and pacing guides suggest a chronological, fact-based approach to teaching and learning history,…

Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

This monograph has grown out of a series of discussions and a six-month period of reading and reflecting on the literature which were initiated by Fritz Mosher's suggestions to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to examine the "standards" question. Conversations with Mosher himself and the staff of NAEP have been most…