The first large-scale, nationwide academic achievement testing program using Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford) for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the United States started in 1969. Over the past three decades, the Stanford has served as a benchmark in the field of deaf education for assessing student academic achievement. However, the…

This study examined how much improvement was attainable with respect to accuracy of differential item functioning (DIF) measures and DIF detection rates in the Mantel-Haenszel procedure when employing focal and reference groups with notably unbalanced sample sizes where the focal group has a fixed small sample which does not satisfy the minimum…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

Between March and June of 2014, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium conducted a field test of its new online assessment system. Thirteen participating states provided the results of surveys given to students and adults involved in the Field Test. Overall, more than 70% of test coordinators in each of seven states indicated that the Field…

Background: Over the past several decades, a significant number of states have either adopted or increased high school exit examination requirements. Although these policies are intended to generate improvement in schools, little is known about how high schools are responding to exit testing pressures. Purpose: This study examined how five…

This College Choice Report series follows the ACT-tested high school graduating class of 2014, focusing on specific testing behaviors that may expand college opportunities available to students. This is an important topic for enrollment managers and admissions officers to consider, as students' participation in these testing behaviors have…

Interpreting the image-language interface in multimodal texts is now well recognized as a crucial aspect of reading comprehension in a number of official school syllabi such as the recently published Australian Curriculum: English (ACE). This article outlines the relevant expected student learning outcomes in this curriculum and draws attention to…

In many practical testing situations, alternate test forms from the same testing program are not strictly parallel to each other and instead the test forms exhibit small psychometric differences. This article investigates the potential practical impact that these small psychometric differences can have on expected classification accuracy. Ten…

The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of differential item functioning (DIF) assessment in the presence of a multilevel structure that often underlies data from large-scale testing programs. Analyses were conducted using logistic regression (LR), a popular, flexible, and effective tool for DIF detection. Data were simulated…

Scholars of education policy have consistently found that the capacity, beliefs, and values of local actors affect the relative success or failure of policy implementation. This article examines stakeholders' perceptions of education policy in South Carolina to consider the relationship between interpretations of education policy and attitudes of…

Many studies point to potential unintended consequences of accountability systems such as when schools narrow their teaching to fixate on tested subjects. As a result, some states and districts in the USA have complemented the federal test-based accountability system with additional measures of educational practices to hold schools accountable on…

This study investigated the application of multidimensional item response theory (IRT) models to validate test structure and dimensionality. Multiple content areas or domains within a single subject often exist in large-scale achievement tests. Such areas or domains may cause multidimensionality or local item dependence, which both violate the…

This paper explores Rizvi and Lingard's (2010) idea of the "local vernacular" of the global education policy trend of using high-stakes testing to increase accountability and transparency, and by extension quality, within schools and education systems in Australia. In the first part of the paper a brief context of the policy trajectory…

Teachers are now experiencing the age of quantitative test-driven assessment, in which there is little weight accorded to teacher-based judgement about student progress. In the Australian context, the NAPLaN test has become a driving force in school and teacher accountability. The language of NAPLaN is one of bands and numerical scores and…

Maintaining comparability of test scores is a major challenge faced by testing programs that have almost continuous administrations. Among the potential problems are scale drift and rapid accumulation of errors. Many standard quality control techniques for testing programs, which can effectively detect and address scale drift for small numbers of…