In critiquing our paper on "The literacy performance of ex-Reading Recovery students between two and four years following participation in the program: Is this intervention effective for students with early reading difficulties?", Schwartz argues that we have engaged in pursuing political and ideological agendas as part of our ongoing…

Over the past decade, international and national education agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than quantity) of education in developing countries. This trend has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality of learning. As…

This paper examines remedial programs in colleges and discusses the relationship of those programs to diagnostic testing. The Basic Skills Placement Test (BSPT) is required of all College freshman in New Jersey public colleges. Mercer County Community College, used as an example throughout this paper, uses the BSPT as a basis for placing students…

Five essays for reading instructors at two-year colleges are provided in this issue of "Forum for Reading." First, Kent Smith notes the increased recruitment of underprepared students and argues that colleges are responsible for assuring that admissions personnel, administrators, and faculty know the types of students they can and cannot…

The document presents 10 papers addressing special education programs in Wessex, England, and reviews of 11 books dealing with special education for disabled children. Papers have the following titles and authors: "The Development of New Services for Mentally Handicapped People in Horticulture and Agriculture" by D. Carter and A. Carter;…

Discusses the differing responses of two groups of administrators and teachers to a new statewide reading assessment--one group saw the ideal and one group experienced the reality. (SR)

A discussion of the problems inherent in verbal test taxonomies not based on the schematic domain of logic is presented. This discussion is made in the context of syntactically complex tests. A suggested structure for a logically constructed taxonomy developed for use in a federal testing program is delineated. (Author/DWH)

Offers six Arizona teachers' comments on the new Arizona Student Assessment Program (ASAP). Discusses how the test affects children, whether the testing procedure is easily understood by teachers, how the ASAP differs from a standardized test, how the classroom teaching process has changed as a result of the test, concerns about the test, and…

Notes that the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) recent assessment found fundamental changes taking place in education and in society which render the apolitical, uniform, "one size fits all" approach to education dysfunctional. Calls for reconceptualizing reading instruction to benefit all readers rather than just the…

Examines the extent and direction of curriculum bias in standardized reading achievement tests by comparing the relative overlap in the contents of five separate reading achievement tests with the content of seven commercial reading series. (HOD)

The author was startled by the carelessness and selectivity of Robert Slavin's comments, which give his words the ring of a promotional release rather than of intellectual reflection. He agrees that Slavin is accurate in saying that the scores on reading tests at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx improved during a period in which, among a number of other…

This paper states that today's newspaper and educational journal articles complain that only half the school population can read on grade level. Yet standardized tests are written to spread pupils out from the first to the 99th percentile, or from three or more standard deviations above to three or more standard deviations below the mean.…

Describes a collaboration among policy makers, test developers, curriculum specialists, researchers, and classroom teachers in Michigan that has produced a new interactive definition of reading, new statewide reading objectives, and efforts to develop statewide tests that are more consistent with current theory and research. (FL)

The Assessment Policy Committee of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has directed the NAEP staff to focus the 1985-86 Assessments of Reading, Mathematics, Science, and Computer Competence on the higher-order skills. Each Learning Area Committee worked independently developing three-dimensional models. These defined what could…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) survey of reading achievement is assessed, its objectives are discussed, and recommendations for future testing are made. It appears that a great deal has been learned about the nation's levels of reading achievment from the four NAEP reading assessments conducted from 1970 to 1984. NAEP…