The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program is a series of periodic assessments administered nationally to samples of students and designed to measure different content areas. This article describes a multi-year study that focused on the breadth of the development, administration, maintenance, and renewal of the assessments in…

Licensure testing programs in the United States (e.g., nursing) face an increasing challenge of measuring the competency of internationally trained candidates, both in relation to their clinical competence and their English language competence. To assist with the latter, professional licensing bodies often adopt well-established and widely…

As an alternative to adaptation, tests may also be developed simultaneously in multiple languages. Although the items on such tests could vary substantially, scores from these tests may be used to make the same types of decisions about different groups of examinees. The ability to make such decisions is contingent upon setting performance…

The development of a hypothetical testing program designed to provide optimum information about student achievement is chronicled. Computer adaptive testing and performance testing are postulated as part of the program. What optimum information really means is discussed. Optimum is only optimal when theory and application are balanced. (SLD)

Because districts in Nebraska are not measured on common instruments, comparisons are difficult. This study examined a district evaluation strategy that classifies districts into school performance ratings (SPR) based on a combination of three factors. Student performance and non-cognitive indicator data for three grade levels and two content…

Test publishers have promoted their commercially available, norm-referenced achievement tests as viable solutions to assessment challenges faced by states. They argue that their tests are developed professionally, and, therefore, possess sound psychometric properties not often found in state-specific efforts. This study compared judgments from two…

Proposed an accountably model that addresses the challenges of allowing school districts to choose the specific strategies they use to measure student performance and evaluated this model using data from multiple sources for all school districts in Florida. Findings identify three strategies that would be useful for this type of accountability…

One Midwestern state has chosen a model of state assessment in which local school districts are responsible for developing the strategies to measure and report their students' performance on state-adopted content standards. When students are not measured on common instruments, district accountability becomes an added challenge. This paper presents…