Academic institutions dedicate a substantial effort to ensure the academic success of their students. At the course level, teachers recommend learning paths (RLPs) for students to guarantee the achievement of their learning outcomes. In terms of performance, these kinds of approaches are deemed more effective than others based uniquely on…

Argumentation skills are emphasized by the common core state standards (CCSS) and are viewed as essential for success in college, career, and life. Our project aims to develop formative assessment tasks measuring students' argumentative reading and writing skills. We used the framework of the "Discuss and Debate Ideas" key practice…

This paper examines how different measures of teacher quality are related to students' long-run educational trajectories. We estimate teachers' "test-based" and "nontest" value-added (the latter based on contributions to student absences, suspensions, grade progression, and grades) and assess how these predict various student…

This paper explores how student performance across the full set of multiple modular assessments of individual standards, which we refer to as mini-assessments, from a large scale, operational program of interim assessment can be summarized using Bayesian networks. We follow a completely data-driven approach in which no constraints are imposed to…

When researchers code behavior that is undetectable or falls outside of the validated ordinal scale, the resultant outcomes often suffer from informative missingness. Incorrect analysis of such data can lead to biased arguments around efficacy and effectiveness in the context of experimental and intervention research. Here, we detail a new…

Purpose: A growing trend in instructional improvement efforts is the use of formative assessment informed by research-based developmental trajectories of how students gain deeper understanding of subject matter content over time. This article reports the findings of a large-scale experimental study of an innovative mathematics professional…