Instructional coaching, informed by observation tools that measure teachers' practices, has been effective in improving teaching quality in early learning programs. However, existing measurement tools limit teachers' abilities to implement this type of instructional coaching at scale. To address this challenge, a team at SRI Education, along with…

Cheating attracts a significant amount of attention in conversations about assessment, and with good reason: if students cheat, we cannot be sure they have met the learning outcomes of their course. In this conceptual article we question the attention given to cheating as a concept and argue that the broader concept of validity is a more important…

Following employers' criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking ("twenty-first century skills"). So far, such skills have typically been assessed by student self-reports or with multiple-choice tests. An alternative…

Programmatic assessment is both a philosophy and a method for assessment. It has been developed in medical education as a response to the limitation of the dominant testing or measurement approaches and to better align with changes in how medical competence was conceptualised. It is based on continual collection of assessment and feedback…

Assessments come in many forms in part because they serve many purposes, and those purposes often vary by the stakeholders they support. Students, parents, teachers, and school, district and state leaders may all be end users of the information provided by various assessments. This brief supports state leaders' understanding of assessments by…

This chapter discusses how to improve validity in SoTL studies through generating appropriate measures and using designs that examine causality between an activity and students' performance. [Part II available at EJ1029365.]

This commentary on the article titled "Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers: A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier 1 Teacher Licensure" provides an overview of Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), its relationship to edTPA and…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics summative assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. The ELA/L assessments focus on reading and comprehending a range of sufficiently complex texts independently and…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. New Meridian, in coordination with multiple states and vendors, developed an alternate form of the summative assessment to…

Students tend to believe that RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is an unfailingly valid measure of teaching effectiveness, and in fact viewing that site prior to taking a course can have a direct influence on their future evaluations of faculty. The authors describe an activity whose objective is to have students analyze different types of validity using…

Special preparation for tests has been a relatively contentious issue. The controversy has entailed (a) disagreement over the effectiveness of such preparation, (b) concern over unequal access to it, and (c) worries about its impact on the validity of test scores. This paper provides a brief history of ETS's involvement with, and contribution to,…

Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relations in policy processes, showing who influences policy agendas, policy creation, and policy implementation. Yet showing particular actors' influence on specific points in a policy text remains a methodological challenge. This article presents a…

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the edTPA, a performance assessment created by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) and administered by Pearson, Inc., to assess the professional readiness of student teachers. We challenge claims made in support of using this assessment, specifically within the…

Two tests intended to measure student achievement of the Common Core State Standards will face intense scrutiny, but the test makers say they will include performance assessments and other items that are not multiple-choice questions. Incorporating performance items on this tests will bring up issues over scoring, costs, and validity.

The vast majority of second language teachers feels confident about their instructional performance and does not usually have much difficulty with their teaching thanks to their professional training and accumulated classroom experience. Nonetheless, many second language teachers may not have received sufficient training in test development to…