As state tests of student achievement are used for an increasingly wide array of high- and low-stakes purposes, evaluating their instructional sensitivity is essential. This article uses data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Project to examine the instructional sensitivity of 4 states' mathematics and English…

Scores from value-added models (VAMs), as used for educational accountability, represent the educational effect teachers have on their students. The use of these scores in teacher evaluations for high-stakes decision making is new for the State of Florida. Validity evidence that supports or questions the use of these scores is critically needed.…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe a construct validation study of the Change Facilitator Style Questionnaire (CFSQ), an instrument designed to measure the leadership style of school principals as change facilitators. Design/methodology/approach: Participants included 614 K-12 teachers across the state of Florida involved in the Enhancing…

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) Reading Assessment (FRA) consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 50th percentile) on the reading comprehension…

This report summarizes research findings and implementation practices for teacher and principal value-added models (VAMs), as a first step in the Team Pennsylvania Foundation's (Team PA) pilot project to inform the development of a full, statewide model evaluation system. We have selected 21 studies that represent key issues and findings in the…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…

A framework is presented that relates concepts of audit reliability to the uses of information gathered from a discrepancy program audit of Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title IV-C programs in Florida. Three issues are addressed: (1) the meaning of reliability in relation to the audit process; (2) the importance of reliability of auditor…