The expansion of student opportunity through the flexible spending of Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) builds in direct accountability to the parents who choose and hold the power of the purse. Families can select different schools and service providers if they are dissatisfied with how their student is faring. But ESAs can also be designed…

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…

James Madison University has used dedicated Assessment Days for more than 30 years to collect longitudinal data on student learning outcomes. Our model ensures all incoming students are tested twice: once before beginning classes and again after accumulating 45-70 credit hours. Although each student completes only four instruments during a 2-hour…

Summative assessments measure students' mastery of grade-level academic standards and skills in specific content areas after learning. State summative assessment systems provide students and families, school and district leaders, and state policymakers with valuable data to help understand student progress and school quality. This Policy Guide…

Ultimately, measures in research, testing, assessment and evaluation are used, or have implications, for ranking, intervention, feedback, decision-making or policy purposes. Explicit recognition of this fact brings the often-ignored and sometimes maligned concept of consequences to the fore. Given that measures have personal and social…

States increasingly are incorporating Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEAs) into their comprehensive assessment systems with the goal of helping educators identify gaps in children's competencies, target instruction to children's individual needs, engage parents to better support their child's learning, and identify needs for expanding and…

How and how much should students be tested? What information should schools and districts be required to collect and monitor? And what should be done when that information suggests a school is not meeting the expectations? Those questions are at the heart of Congressional discussions regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary…

The "PIRLS 2016 Assessment Framework, 2nd Edition" provides the foundation for the three international assessments planned as part of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016: PIRLS, PIRLS Literacy, and ePIRLS. PIRLS represents the…

School librarians and other specialists should take note of the new wave of computer-based assessments required by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), testing that is only now beginning to get off the ground. The new testing necessitates that districts possess the right hardware, install the requisite software, and, in some cases, create…

This report identifies the states with current or pending state-level end-of-course assessment (EOC) programs, the subjects in which EOCs are administered in the states, and the EOCs (if any) students must pass to graduate from high school. Twenty-two states currently administer one or more EOCs to all students in an EOC course. This number will…

Talent Development Centers are just one of many tools every family, teacher, and gifted advocate should have in their tool box. To understand the importance of Talent Development Centers, it is essential to also understand the Academic Talent Search Program. Talent Search participants who obtain scores comparable to college-bound high school…

As the tenth anniversary of NCLB has come and gone, both new and experienced educators continue to wrestle yearly with the standardized testing culture that has pervaded the educational experience of nearly every American child and teacher. Despite the requests for waivers to exempt certain states from NCLB, the majority of students and their…

Just like all the high-stakes tests that determine students' futures nowadays, The Chorizo Test is a standardized test rooted in the culture of the test makers. It was originally created to be used with students in teacher training programs to sensitize them to the pitfalls inherent in standardized pencil-and-paper tests, such as linguistic bias…

As the number of end of course (EOC) tests has increased along with an expansion of their role in accountability, development and implementation decisions are more important than ever. This process starts with articulating how the assessment fits into a credible theory of action that describes how all elements of the system will work together to…

In addition to data on overall performance since 1973, this article presents NAEP data on items that were recently released to the public. They are presented as examples of current student achievement in relation to achievement in the 1980s. Performance was stable or improving on most of the released items, with greatest improvement on items…