The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that states make efforts to offer statewide achievement tests in languages, other than English, that are present to a significant extent in the state. Currently, four states offer Spanish reading or language arts assessments as part of their statewide testing program. In these states, practitioners may be…

When New York state released the first results of the exams under the Common Core State Standards, many wrongly believed that the results showed dramatic declines in student achievement. A closer look at the results showed that student achievement may have increased. Another lesson from the exams is that states need to closely coordinate new data…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

The establishment of international testing regimes such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has provided one way for individual countries to monitor the effectiveness of their educational…

The authors studied more than 1 million Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and White seventh graders in a statewide California testing program between 2003 and 2008, examining their reading and math achievement. AAPI student performance is often reported as an aggregate in discussions of the success of schoolchildren and issues of racial…

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting…

Comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the reading portions of the California Achievement Tests. (JT)

1982-83 Georgia Regents' Testing Program reading subtest scores and five aptitude/achievement variables of 256 Black and 3009 White Georgia University sophomores were compared. Classification analysis showed White students scored higher. Results were compared to the National Assessment of Education Program findings. (BS)

Item parameter estimates derived through item response theory methods have been considered relatively robust to changes in item position and context, but the anomaly in reading scores from the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) illustrates problems with common population equating procedures when there are test form changes.…

The relationship between school-level minimum competency testing (MCT) programs and student reading proficiency measured by the 1983-84 National Assessment of Educational Progress was studied in subsamples of 10,367 fourth graders, 10,829 eighth graders, and 13,513 eleventh graders. No advantages of MCT programs were seen in grade 4. (SLD)

To refocus its professional development plan, Chaska Middle School East (Minnesota) looked at where student achievement was lagging. Using the Killion back-mapping model, a student-focused, data-driven, multi-step process by which teachers gather and study student data to determine where professional growth, development, or training is most…

The Baltimore City Public School System's (BCPSS) Grade 9 Transition Program was implemented in 2001-02. It is designed to increase student achievement in an era of No Child Left Behind federal legislation by providing additional time and learning opportunities for eighth-grade students who have not met all promotion standards established by the…

Schemes for assessing reading achievement with specific tests have been in use since early in this century. The two driving forces behind the testing movement--scientific objectivity and compulsory education--blossomed in the 1920s and 1930s and continued substantially unchanged through most of the 1960s. In the early 1970s, the idea of mastery…