Educators rely on a conglomeration of assessment instruments to appraise, measure, monitor, and document evidence of students' academic readiness, learning progressions, acquisition of interdisciplinary knowledge, and extensive educational needs. The Mississippi Academic Assessment Program for Mathematics (MAAP-M) and the i-Ready Assessment…

This paper aims to examine and assess the questions included in the "Turkish Common Exam" for sixth graders held in the first semester of 2018 which is one of the common exams carried out by The Measurement and Evaluation Centers, in terms of question structure, quality and taxonomic value. To this end, the test questions were examined…

A 7-month mathematics proficiency program was conducted in a primary Australian Indigenous community school. This paper focuses on outlining the specific methodologies employed to explore how students' mathematical proficiency changed throughout the implementation of the program in Years 2 to 4 (~ 7 to 9 years old). A mixed methods research design…

This paper discusses educational insights drawn from a mixed-methods study in Religious Education (RE). The study involved 238 teachers and school leaders, working in 65 Catholic schools in Western Australia (WA). The focus of the study was the educators' perceptions of a large-scale, standardised assessment (LSA) called "The Bishops'…

This study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student's capacity to signal their assigned teacher's quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to estimate student reliability and sensitivity…

The aim is to analyse how policy decisions about assessment practices influence what it means to be a student in a performative system. We examine an occasion where a previously mandatory national test became optional, and how students took the opportunity to try to change the school's decision about this. The study is based on student group…

Project-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method that has grown in popularity across all grade levels and subject areas, in both K-12 schools and higher education institutions. PBL embraces the integration of curriculum across subjects, the engagement of home and community in school learning, and the involvement of students in cooperative…

Many adolescents struggle with reading comprehension, despite an emphasis on reading instruction over recent decades. Evidence suggests that informational text is particularly challenging for students. To implement assessments within a multi-tiered framework, schools must have psychometrically adequate tools. Using data of 473 students in Grades 6…

This study defines subpopulation item parameter drift (SIPD) as a change in item parameters over time that is dependent on subpopulations of examinees, and hypothesizes that the presence of SIPD in anchor items is associated with bias and/or lack of invariance in three psychometric outcomes. Results show that SIPD in anchor items is associated…

Two hundred and two (n = 202) sixth-grade students in social studies were administered a weekly vocabulary-matching curriculum-based measure (CBM) for 35 weeks. Students were also administered the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI), along with the annual state high-stakes test in Communication Arts. CBM scores were analyzed with respect to…

We present a logistic function of a monotonic polynomial with a lower asymptote, allowing additional flexibility beyond the three-parameter logistic model. We develop a maximum marginal likelihood based approach to estimate the item parameters. The new item response model is demonstrated on math assessment data from a state, and a computationally…

Most research on linguistic features of test items negatively impacting English language learners' (ELLs') performance has focused on lexical and syntactic features, rather than discourse features that operate at the level of the whole item. This mixed-methods study identified two discourse features in 162 multiple-choice items on a standardized…

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…

Approximately one-third of American freshmen at two-year and four-year colleges require remedial coursework and over 40 percent of employers rate new hires with a high school diploma as "deficient" in their overall preparation for entry-level jobs. Yet, over the past decade, as these students marched through America's public education…

To meet the constantly changing needs of schools and diverse learners, educators must frequently monitor student learning, revise curricula, and improve instruction. Consequently, it is critical that careful analyses of student performance data are ongoing components of curriculum decision-making processes. The primary purpose of this study is to…