Testing students and using test information to hold schools and, in some cases, teachers accountable for student achievement has arguably been the primary national strategy for school improvement over the past decade and a half. Tests are also intended to be used as a diagnostic tool to identify individual student needs, so that students can be…

We present two types of validity evidence to support inferences and decisions about use of easyCBMs in relation to state testing programs. The first type involves the use of Benchmarks in reading to use in making predictions of performance on the Smarter Balanced (SB) test. These predictions can be made both well in advance (several months) or…

MOCCA is an online assessment of inferential reading comprehension for students in 3rd through 6th grades. It can be used to identify good readers and, for struggling readers, identify those who overly rely on either a Paraphrasing process or an Elaborating process when their comprehension is incorrect. Here a propensity to over-rely on…

This technical report is an addendum to a study we initially reported on in 2014 (Wray, Lai, Saez, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2014). In response to a request for additional analyses, in particular reporting confidence intervals around the results, we re-analyzed the data from the Wray et al study. This supplementary report presents the results of the…

This report describes efforts to measure teachers' knowledge of their own students' abilities in mathematics and offers preliminary findings. It provides a description of the sample, a description of the study design and its realization, and descriptive statistics for teacher judgment accuracy. The work described here was completed as part of a…

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest partnered with the Arkansas Department of Education to examine Arkansas's middle school and high school indicators of postsecondary readiness and success, building on an earlier study of these indicators (Hester et al., 2021). Academic indicators include attaining proficiency on state academic…

In response to a request for additional analyses, in particular reporting confidence intervals around the results, we re-analyzed the data from prior studies. This supplementary report presents the results of the additional analyses addressing classification accuracy, reliability, and criterion-related validity evidence. For ease of reference, we…

In response to a request for additional analyses, in particular reporting confidence intervals around the results, we re-analyzed the data from prior studies. This supplementary report presents the results of the additional analyses addressing classification accuracy, reliability, and criterion-related validity evidence. For ease of reference, we…

District and state education leaders frequently use screening assessments to identify students who are at risk of performing poorly on end-of-year achievement tests. This study examines the use of a universal screening assessment of reading skills for early identification of students at risk of low achievement on nationally normed tests of reading…

aimswebPlus® is an assessment, data management, and reporting system that provides national and local performance and growth norms for the screening and progress monitoring of math and reading skills for all students in kindergarten through 8th grade. aimswebPlus uses two types of measures: (1) "curriculum-based measures" (CBMs)--brief,…

In this paper, we examine the validity and precision of two nonexperimental study designs (NXDs) that can be used in educational evaluation: the comparative interrupted time series (CITS) design and the difference-in-difference (DD) design. In a CITS design, program impacts are evaluated by looking at whether the treatment group deviates from its…

The purpose of this evaluation of Scholastic's "System 44" conducted by RMC Research was to expand the existing research on students with learning disabilities by conducting a randomized study of struggling readers with approximately half of the sample comprised of students with learning disabilities. Specifically, this evaluation…

Scholastic's "System 44" is a foundational reading program intended for older struggling readers who have not mastered basic phonics and decoding skills. Combining researched-based phonics instruction with adaptive technology, "System 44" is designed to improve students' word reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The…