Recently, federal legislation has been implemented requiring that public school students meet a specified performance level of academic proficiency by the 2013/2014 school year. This reform movement, known as "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), was passed by Congress and incorporates many of President Bush's educational reform proposals…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of formulaic writing such as the five-paragraph theme (FPT) or essay for the purpose of earning high scores on high-stakes writing assessments. This qualitative descriptive study analyzed more than 1000 essays from Delaware Grade 8 and 10 writers, written for a statewide…

The Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) is designed to assess progress toward the Delaware Content Standards. Every year a certain number of items are removed from the test and then selected for public release. This booklet contains items released from the 2001 administration of the DSTP Science tests for grades 8 and 11. It contains examples…

This document contains the results of a standard setting conducted in January 2002 on the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) Science and Social Studies tests at grades 4 and 6. Each standard setting process entailed convening four groups, one for each grade level and content area, and each group met for 2 days. At the standard setting judges…

This guide is intended to help parents understand the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) and the reports it generates. The DSTP tests are administered to provide an accurate measure of how well students are doing relative to Delaware's rigorous content standards. DSTP tests are administered in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and…

This guide contains materials to help Delaware educators understand and use reports from the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP). The DSTP tests are tied to the Delaware content standards that define the knowledge and skills required for students to progress beyond high school. In spring 2003, the DSTP reading, writing, and mathematics tests…

To help teachers, administrators, and parents understand student performance in writing, a state-level report is prepared each year to analyze students writing scores and provide guidelines for the interpretation of the results. This report compares students scores on the 2001 Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) with scores on the 2000 DSTP…

This report is intended to help parents understand the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) and the reports it generates. The tests of the DSTP are tied to the Delaware content standards that define the knowledge and skills required for students to succeed beyond high school. In spring 2001, the DSTP reading, writing, and mathematics tests were…

The Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) is designed to assess progress toward the Delaware Content Standards. Every year a certain number of items are removed from the test and then selected for public release. This booklet contains multiple-choice and short-answer (constructed response) items released from the 2000 or 2001 administration of…

With the administration of the 2002 Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP), a questionnaire was given to students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 10 about Opportunity to Learn, Reading, Writing, and Mathematics, and to all students in grades 4, 6, 8, and 11 about Opportunity to Learn, Science, and Social Studies. Students responses to the questions were…

This study modeled school and district effects in the mathematics scores of the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) using hierarchical linear modeling. Three-level hierarchical models were fitted to estimate school and district effects in the DSTP mathematics scores and to examine the school and district variance with variables assessing…

With the administration of the 2002 Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP), a questionnaire was given to students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 10 about Opportunity to Learn, Reading, Writing, and Mathematics, and to all students in grades 4, 6, 8, and 11 about Opportunity to Learn, Science, and Social Studies. Students responses to the questions were…

The Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) is designed to assess progress toward the Delaware Content Standards. Every year a certain number of items are removed from the test and then selected for public release. This booklet contains items released from the 1998 administration of the DSTP mathematics component tests. Taken as a whole, these…

This guide contains information to help teachers understand and use reports from the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP). The DSTP is designed to be a measure of progress toward Delaware's content standards that helps ensure that students can apply their academic skills to realistic, everyday problems. The DSTP aims to promote better…

This report, submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, contains summary details of Delaware students' growth in the areas of reading, mathematics, writing, science and social studies. The results reported herein are part of a long-term effort to gather data on Delaware students' educational progress and use the data to inform decisions about…