High-quality measurement tools are critical to school improvement efforts. Education researchers frequently employ surveys in order to assess a host of variables associated with school improvement. This article asserts that Rasch modeling techniques enhance the quality of a measurement tool because they comprise elements of both qualitative and…

Interest in 21st century skills has brought concomitant interest in ways to teach and measure them. Games hold promise in these areas, but much of their potential has yet to be proven, and there are few examples of how to use the rich data from games to make inferences about players' knowledge, skills, and attributes. This article builds an…

Students with significant cognitive disabilities present an assessment dilemma that centers on access and validity in large-scale testing programs. Typically, access is improved by eliminating construct-irrelevant barriers, while validity is improved, in part, through test standardization. In this article, one state's alternate assessment data…

The purpose of this study is to identify the self-reported research-based instructional and assessment practices used by third through fifth grade teachers among rural school environments in Western Pennsylvania which have attained Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) pursuant to statewide assessments. Specifically, this study examines the…

The climate of school classrooms, shaped by a combination of teacher practices and peer processes, is an important determinant for children's psychosocial functioning and is a primary factor affecting bullying and victimization. Given that there are relatively few theoretically grounded and validated assessment tools designed to measure the social…

How many students repeat a grade each year? How do retention rates vary across states and over time? Despite extensive research on the predictors and consequences of grade retention, there is no systematic way to quantify state-level retention rates; even national estimates rely on imperfect proxy measures. We present a conceptually simple…

This article introduces the Measurement Skills Assessment (MeSA), which was designed to evaluate the mastery of measurement in elementary school students. The primary objectives for the MeSA include covering a broad range of measurement concepts, distinguishing between major subtypes of measurement, and constructing a continuum of items varying in…

Selecting appropriate measures to make decisions about child response to intervention is a key concern. The most commonly used assessment tool in response to intervention (RTI) models is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). However, an issue related to the use of CBM is the identification of measures that are of similar difficulty. To the degree…

In practice, vertical scales have been continually used to measure students' achievement progress across several grade levels and have been considered very challenging psychometric procedures. Recently, such practices have been drawing many criticisms. The major criticisms focus on dimensionality and construct equivalence of the latent trait or…

The 4Rs Program (Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution) is a "dual focus" whole school universal intervention designed to promote literacy development and social-emotional learning, that is currently being rigorously evaluated using a school-randomized trial of 18 elementary schools (9 intervention, 9 control) in New York City. The…

The Olweus checklist, along with most of the questionnaires commonly used in bullying research, is anonymous. The respondent is not required to put down his/her name. This has been accepted as the "best suited" method of assessing bullying. However, this assumption has not been adequately tested, and there is contrary evidence that this…

Universal design of assessment has been an important step forward in making tests more accessible to students with disabilities. An issue affecting the universal design approach is the need to review individual items, potentially hundreds of them. Ideally, there would be a statistical procedure available that would first identify items that are…

This technical report describes a study that was undertaken to compare the content of two recent fourth-and eighth-grade assessments in science: the NAEP 2000 assessment and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 assessment. Its aim is to provide information that will be useful for interpreting and comparing the…

Year-to-year rater variation may result in constructed response (CR) parameter changes, making CR items inappropriate to use in anchor sets for linking or equating. This study demonstrates how rater severity affected the writing and reading scores. Rater adjustments were made to statewide results using an item response theory (IRT) methodology…

In recent years metacognition has been receiving increased attention in mathematics education. Special attention has been focused on metacognition and its essential role in achievement settings. The basic difficulty of the study on the field of metacognition is to develop and use valid tasks in order to measure metacognitive ability especially for…