Recent years have produced a surge in interest in improving state assessment programs. Many states are designing new assessments. Much of this innovation is aimed at addressing longstanding areas of unhappiness with typical domain-sampled, end-of-year state assessments: States want to streamline assessment activities, enhance the instructional…

Every two years, institutions sponsoring credentialing programs in California are required to submit a detailed biennial report, which includes data on at least four key assessments showing 1) candidate competence and/or 2) program efficacy. This article reports the types of assessments used from 25 institutions that completed biennial reports for…

Physical education teachers and programs are affected by increasing accountability demands. The purpose of this article is to explain Ohio's journey from advocacy for state physical education academic content standards to state-level policy that led to the development of state-wide assessments and data reporting on each school's report card. The…

The first national youth fitness evaluation conducted in the United States was in 1958. Since that time, schools have continued to administer fitness evaluations using a variety of tests with no national-level assessment of youth fitness [Institute of Medicine (IOM), 2012]. However, in September 2012, the Presidential Youth Fitness Program (PYFP)…

Unparalleled demands on state assessment programs and conditions associated with the availability of federal monies, particularly the $350 million portion of the $4 billion Race to the Top funds set aside for assessment, have led to a renewed interest in the establishment of state consortia for the development and administration of assessment…

In large-scale assessments, such as state-wide testing programs, national sample-based assessments, and international comparative studies, there are many steps involved in the measurement and reporting of student achievement. There are always sources of inaccuracies in each of the steps. It is of interest to identify the source and magnitude of…

Nearly four years after a front-page story in "The New York Times" sparked a fierce debate by suggesting that charter school students nationally were lagging academically behind their peers in regular public schools, the national testing program that informed the controversy has generated far more data for researchers and advocates to scrutinize.…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…

This article reports that national tests in several core subjects could be eliminated or scaled back over the next five years without more federal funding. The officials who set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) say scheduled exams in economics, foreign language, geography, and world history could be canceled if…

The U.S. public has consistently favored standardized testing in the schools, preferably with consequences (or "stakes") riding on the results, ever since the first polls taken on the topic several decades ago. Results from different polls approaching the topic in different ways suggest that nearly all Americans would like to see…

Since 1984, passing scores on the Preprofessional Skills Tests (PPST) have been required for entry into teacher education programs at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). College of education faculty, concerned because the majority of their population has traditionally been older, Hispanic students, developed a pre-PPST screening and…

In the interests of improving and ensuring the quality of teachers in the schools, testing is increasingly becoming an integral part of the certification process. Almost all states currently require that prospective teachers pass a test either as a requirement for entering a teacher education preparation program or after completing such a program…

The Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), Test of Academic Skills Level I was administered to 10,186 tenth grade students in Hawaii during fall 1984. This two-section report presents findings from the SAT's mathematics subtest. This subtest measured students' competency in these nine areas: numbers, symbols, and sets; number properties and operations…

The Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), Intermediate Level II, was administered to 11,077 sixth grade students during fall 1984. This two-section report presents findings of the SAT's three mathematics subtests. These subtests measured competency related to: (1) mathematics concepts (number, notation, operations, and geometry/measurement), (2)…

This paper resulted from the work of the Study Group on Transitions in Assessments from IASA ("Improving America's Schools Act of 1994") to NCLB ("No Child Left Behind Act of 2001") comprised of state educational specialists and consultants of the Comprehensive Assessment Systems for ESEA ("Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965") Title I…