Proportional reasoning is an important type of reasoning that students need to develop and was thus chosen as the context for my research of multiple-choice (MC) items. My investigations of ways to improve the function of MC items so that they reduced guessing, better addressed higher order thinking and assessed partial knowledge, influenced my…

In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only continuing and nationally representative measure of trends in academic achievement of U.S. elementary and secondary school students in various subjects. For more than four decades, NAEP assessments have been conducted periodically in reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S.…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") push students to have "a deeper understanding of content" (NGSS Lead States 2013, Appendix A, p. 4). However, with the reality of high-stakes assessments that rely primarily on multiple-choice questions, how can a science teacher analyze students' written responses…

Student errors are springboards for analyzing, reasoning, and justifying. The mathematics education community recognizes the value of student errors, noting that "mistakes are seen not as dead ends but rather as potential avenues for learning." To induce specific errors and help students learn, choose tasks that might produce mistakes.…

The reading framework for the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) presents the assessment's conceptual base and discusses its content. The framework describes the types of texts and questions that should be included in the assessment, as well as how the questions should be designed and scored. This report provides highlights of…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

Multiple-choice items are commonly viewed as a summative check for skill attainment, but they can be used to assess other dimensions of student learning. The purpose of this article is to offer an expanded view of the use of multiple-choice items in the middle level mathematics classroom. It presents three alternative uses of multiple-choice items…

Present large-scale assessments require the use of item formats, such as multiple choice, that can be administered and scored efficiently. This limits competencies that can be measured by these assessments. An alternative approach to large-scale assessments is being investigated that would include the use of complex performance assessments. As…