The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001 (MCKV), which provides funds to local educational agencies (LEAs), is almost a decade old, yet no evaluations of its academic effectiveness have been reported. Using a systems theory framework, the authors answer the question of whether homeless students in grade 6 from LEAs…

Although many researchers and policy analysts (e.g., Harris, Glazerman et al., 2011; 2010) consider value-added to be the state of the art in school and teacher productivity measurement, only a minority of Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) Round 1 and 2 grantees used value-added as a measure of school or teacher performance. Fourteen of the 34 grantees…

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the nation's oldest and largest urban school choice program, offering private-school scholarships to low-income students in the city of Milwaukee since 1990. In the early years of the program, voucher schools were not required to test their students, though many of them did so using nationally normed…

We use a regression discontinuity strategy to produce causal estimates for the effect of remediation under Florida's test-based promotion policy on multiple outcomes for up to five years after the intervention. Students subjected to the policy were retained in the third grade, were required to be assigned to a high-quality teacher during the…

The developmental education process, as it is typically implemented in colleges across the country, seems straightforward: underprepared students are assessed and placed into an appropriate developmental course sequence designed to prepare them for college-level work; once finished with the sequence, these students presumably then move on to…

The strengths and weaknesses of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) are described with reference to its origins, previous research and comments from critics and supporters. A case is made for this allegedly theoretical approach to provide the kind of outcomes focused intervention that psychology and psychologists can offer to schools. In…

This report discusses the progress of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) evaluation and presents a brief summary of the main findings of the seven distinct topical reports that have been completed for 2007-08--the second year of the evaluation. Those seven specialized reports build on the five reports that were released in 2008 and are:…

The paper gives an overview of multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) and evaluates its applicability in educational and psychological testing. The approach of Segall (1996) is described as a general framework for MAT. The main advantage of MAT is its capability to increase measurement efficiency. In simulation studies conceptualizing situations…

The Internal Medicine In-Training Examination (ITE) is administered during residency training in the United States as a self-assessment and program assessment tool. Performance on this exam correlates with outcome on the American Board of Internal Medicine Certifying examination. Internal Medicine Program Directors use the United States Medical…

Given the relatively high intercorrelations observed between mathematics achievement, reading achievement, and cognitive ability, it has recently been claimed that student assessment studies (e.g., TIMSS, PISA) and intelligence tests measure a single cognitive ability that is practically identical to general intelligence. The present article uses…

The adoption of state accountability testing in the 1990s coincided with the movement of some school start dates from September into August. Using data from Wisconsin, this paper connects these phenomena, showing that some low-scoring districts advanced their school start dates to allow their students more time to prepare for exams. I use a 2001…

In the summer of 2011, the Tennessee Department of Education contracted with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) to provide a four-day training for all evaluators across the state. NIET trained more than 5,000 evaluators intensively in the state model (districts using alternative instruments delivered their own training).…

K12 Inc. enrolls more public school students than any other private education management organization in the U.S. Much has been written about K12 Inc. (referred to in this report simply as "K12") by financial analysts and investigative journalists because it is a large, publicly traded company and is the dominant player in the operation…

This report describes results from field-testing of POWERSOURCE[C] formative assessment alongside professional development and instructional resources. The researchers at the National Center for Research, on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST) employed a randomized, controlled design to address the following question: Does the…

For decades Japan has remained at or near the top of international assessments of student learning; and in the past decade, students in Japan have become more engaged in learning. However, the government aspires to improve learning outcomes even further. "Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for…