As a condition of receiving federal funds, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires state education agencies to implement statewide assessments in mathematics and English language arts every year in third through eighth grade and once in ninth through 12th grade. The federal law also requires a science assessment once in each of three grade spans:…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

Oral reading fluency is a critical feature and outcome of early literacy instruction and it has amassed great attention as a powerful predictor of success at all levels of schooling. We examined relationships between second grade oral reading fluency scores and third grade end-of-grade reading achievement scores for students (N = 9562) in a large…

In "Beyond Test Scores: Leading Indicators for Education," Foley and colleagues (2008) define leading indicators as those that "provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement" (p. 1) and stress that educators "need leading indicators to help them see the direction their efforts are going in and to take…

The Federal education policy No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has initiated high-stakes testing among U.S. public schools. The premise of the NCLB initiative is that all students reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Under NCLB, individual state education departments were required to implement annual assessments in grades two through eight…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

This study examined the effectiveness of a pilot program utilizing practice standardized test questions for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in an economically disadvantaged school and evaluated the impact of the pilot program on pre- and post-test practice tests in language arts literacy and on the 2009 New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…

Age-normed tests of listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression were administered in Grades 1 (n = 128), 3, and 5, or 3 (n = 113), 5, and 7. Confirmatory factor analyses compared 1- and 4-factor models at each grade level and supported a 4-factor model of language by ear, mouth, eye, and hand. Multiple…

The Summer Enrichment Camp (SEC) at Pequea Valley School District was developed to provide an extended school year for at-risk, Title I, students. This study compared the learning growth of the SEC students with similar students who did not attend SEC. The 36 students in the SEC group were compared to 18 non-SEC students using district and state…