Recently, student outcomes have bubbled to the top of debates about how to evaluate teaching in community and liberal arts colleges, universities, and professional schools, but even more international attention has been riveted on how outcomes are being used to evaluate teachers and administrators K-12 (Harris, 2012; Rowen & Raudenbush, 2016;…

Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015 signaled a new era for teacher evaluation reform. Under ESSA, states and districts have greater autonomy to design and implement teacher evaluation systems independent of federal influence. This new flexibility brings with it new responsibilities and challenges for states and…

Authentic assessment is a growing alternative to conventional testing. This research-to-practice article describes a framework for implementing authentic assessment. The R-E-A-L framework shows how roles, equipment, assessment tools, and location can be incorporated into early childhood practices.

Lack of sufficient accessible community-based health care services for individuals with developmental disabilities has led to disparities in health outcomes and an overreliance on expensive models of care delivered in hospitals and other safety net or state-subsidized providers. A functioning community-based primary health care model, with an…

Discusses the quality of school-level data collected as part of state accountability systems, including the reliability and validity of school-level test scores as a measure of the value added by schools to student learning, outlining ways that these data can be usefully analyzed; illustrating challenges inherent in doing so; and discussing…

Some early childhood variables are examined to evaluate their predictive validity. The selection of children needing early childhood Title I services is complicated by the lack of criteria for defining who is educationally disadvantaged and the special problems of early childhood testing and measurement. The study used re-analysis of longitudinal…

What can teachers do in their classrooms to help students prepare for a high-stakes, standardized, multiple-choice reading test without sacrificing what they know to be best practice? Decreasing class sizes or other solutions that require substantial changes in school finance are not usually realistic options. This article outlines five…

This report describes one segment of the Federal Language Testing Board's Unified Language Testing Plan (ULTP), the validation of speaking proficiency tests in Spanish and English. The ULTP is a project to increase standardization of foreign language proficiency measurement and promote sharing of resources among testing programs in the federal…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLBA) focused attention on the academic achievement of more than 5 million students with limited English proficiency. Obtaining valid test results for these students is challenging, given their language barriers. This testimony describes: (1) the extent to which these students are meeting annual academic…

Research activities underway as part of the Air Force's Learning Abilities Measurement Program (LAMP) are described. A major objective of the program is to devise new models of the nature and organization of human abilities, that could be applied to improve personnel selection and classification systems. The activities of the project have been…

This is the sixth and final report of the National Research Council's Committee on the Performance of Military Personnel on the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM) Project, a project designed to develop measures of performance for entry-level military jobs so that enlistment standards could be linked to performance…

State and federal mandates for education reform call for increased accountability and the inclusion of students with disabilities in all accountability efforts. In the rush to implement high-stakes education reforms, particularly those involving tests or assessments, the particular needs of students with severe cognitive disabilities are only now…

This third document in a three-volume summative evaluation report submitted to the National Institute of Education presents a portion of the internal evaluation conducted by the Mountain-Plains program, a residential, family-based education program developed to improve the economic potential and lifestyle of selected student families in a…