Technology has changed every aspect of our lives such as communication, shopping, games, business, and education. Technology has been used for decades in the teaching and learning environment in K-12 education and higher education, especially in mathematics education where the use of instructional technology has great potential. Today's students…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) field tests during the spring of 2014 provided an opportunity to investigate the quality of the items, tasks, and associated stimuli. HumRRO conducted several research studies summarized in this report. Quality of test items is integral to the "Theory of Action"…

Variation in test performance among examinees from different regions or national jurisdictions is often partially attributed to differences in the degree of content correspondence between local school or training program curricula, and the test of interest. This posited relationship between test-curriculum correspondence, or "alignment,"…

As states begin to demand more rigor on their high-stakes tests--and the tests evolve to incorporate revised academic standards--many officials are gambling that an initial wave of lower scores will give way to greater student achievement in the future. Changes to statewide tests and subsequent plummeting scores sparked controversy and emergency…

The "TextEvaluator"® text analysis tool is a fully automated text complexity evaluation tool designed to help teachers, curriculum specialists, textbook publishers, and test developers select texts that are consistent with the text complexity guidelines specified in the Common Core State Standards.This paper documents the procedure used…

In an effort to cure the ills of current grading and reporting systems, many schools and districts across the United States have attempted to implement a standards-based system. The authors recommend four best practices in this area: (1) Get rid of the omnibus grade, which tells teachers little about the content measured or the difficulty level of…

This paper highlights the current findings and issues regarding the role of computer-adaptive testing in test anxiety. The computer-adaptive test (CAT) proposed by one of the Common Core consortia brings these issues to the forefront. Research has long indicated that test anxiety impairs student performance. More recent research indicates that…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Last Cut Is the Deepest: Final FY 2011 Spending Agreement Cuts Spending by Nearly $40 Billion, Includes More Cuts for Education…

Recently growth-based approaches to accountability have received considerable attention because they have the potential to reward schools and teachers for improving student performance over time by measuring the progress of students at all levels of the performance spectrum (including those who have not yet reached proficiency on state…

Growth-based approaches to federal accountability are receiving considerable attention because they have the potential to reward schools and teachers for improving student performance over time by measuring student progress at all levels of the performance spectrum, including progress by students who have not reached proficiency on state…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

The purpose of the present study is to examine the language characteristics of a few states' large-scale assessments of mathematics and science and investigate whether the language demands of the items are associated with the degree of differential item functioning (DIF) for English language learner (ELL) students. A total of 542 items from 11…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…