Because of the Common Core State Standards there is a renewed emphasis on the importance of visual literacies in today's classrooms. Students need prior knowledge before approaching these types of texts. This article describes the results of one 6th-grade language arts class's engagement in pre-reading prior to viewing a theatrical…

Student responses to the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST) 2 Online Writing Assessment are scored by a computer-scoring engine. The scoring method is not widely understood among educators, and there exists a misperception that it is not comparable to hand scoring. To address these issues, the West Virginia Department of Education…

Statewide exit examinations play an important role in discussions on school effectiveness. Referring to educational governance concepts, this paper presumes a relation between varying organizational structures of statewide examinations across states, and heterogeneous effects on school actors. It is assumed that their ability to affect work in…

Many U.S. students must pass a standards-based exit exam to earn a high school diploma. The degree to which exit exams and state standards properly signal to students their preparedness for postsecondary schooling has been questioned. The alignment of test scores with college grades for students at the University of Arizona (n = 2,667) who took…

When 2006 Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores were released in March 2007, there were many questions about the comparability of the 2006 test to earlier ISATs. The 2006 ISAT was a new test, with new items, a new format, new timing requirements, and new scoring procedures. Many people were skeptical about whether it was appropriate to…

The purpose of this study was to determine if a significant relationship existed between nursing students' scores on the Mosby Assess Test and the students' scores on the National Council Licensure Examination. The subjects consisted of 172 nursing students in their last semester of the Associate Degree Nursing program at the Eastern Kentucky…

The performance of baccalaureate nursing school graduates on the new National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) was compared to graduates' performance on the old examination, the State Board Test Pool Examination (SBTPE). Data were gathered for 287 graduates who took the SBTPE between 1979-1981 and 175 graduates who took the NCLEX in 1982 and…

The relationships among independent observer ratings of a child care program on the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), state department personnel ratings of program quality using the Child Development Program Evaluation Scale (CDPES), and self-evaluation ratings using the self-assessment instrument designed for the Early Childhood…