The FAIR-FS consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 40th percentile) on the reading comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10) in the…

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…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

This article investigates the utility of various estimates of mathematics proficiency. The participants were 432 students in Grades 2 through 5. The delayed alternate form reliability of multiskill probes, retention probes, slopes of student growth, and trials to criterion were computed. The fluency probes were found to be both sufficiently…

The ability of the Stanford Early School Achievement Test (SESAT) to predict scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) was assessed, using pupils in grades 1 and 2 from a large midwest suburban school district. Observed SESAT-SAT correlations ranged from .257 to .723. Author/CTM)

The attitude of students toward taking achievement tests, as well as the relationship between this attitude and student performance on achievement tests, was studied in three southern Illinois schools. Students in grades six through nine were administered the 1973 Stanford Achievement Tests, followed by an attitudinal test developed for the study…

As part of the development of a test battery to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, a test was devised consisting of a repetition task. Fifteen sentences in black standard and 15 in black nonstandard English were to be repeated. A black experimenter administered the test individually to 35 black kindergartners. The…

The relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement of at-risk adolescent black males was studied for 42 students in grades 6, 7, and 8. The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) was used to provide global measures of self-esteem. School grades and scores from the Stanford Achievement Test battery were used to measure academic…

The Anchor Test Study provides a method for translating a pupil's score on any one of eight widely used standardized reading tests for Grades 4, 5, and 6 to a corresponding score on any of the other seven tests, as well as furnishing new nationally representative norms for each of the eight tests. In addition, the study presents new estimates of…