Against the backdrop of global transformations in university admission systems, the quest for an enrolment paradigm that efficiently identifies and selects high-quality students has gained paramount significance. With the help of propensity score matching (PSM), this study controlled students' backgrounds and compared the performance of students…

There is considerable variability in the literacy assessments taken in Kindergarten through second grade, across schools and between multilingual learners and other students, and within students over time. This makes it difficult to study changes in students' acquisition of ELA skills in these formative years, or to evaluate policies and practices…

Students' performances in introductory programming courses show large variation across students. There may be many reasons for these variations, such as methods of teaching, teacher competence in the subject, students' coding backgrounds and abilities, students' self-discipline, the teaching environment, and the resources available to students,…

College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education. Improving the quality of instruction may…

The Michigan Context and Performance Report Card measures school performance by adjusting standardized test scores to account for student background. Comparing schools using unadjusted test scores ignores the significant relationship between academic performance and student socioeconomic background--a dynamic outside a school's control. The…

In 1997 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) partnered with countries around the world to design the ambitious and innovative Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Beginning in 2000, and every three years since, OECD/PISA has assessed 15-year-old students in participating countries to gauge the extent…

The TIMSS 2011 International Database includes data for all questionnaires administered as part of the TIMSS 2011 assessment. This supplement contains the international version of the TIMSS 2011 background questionnaires and curriculum questionnaires in the following 10 sections: (1) Fourth Grade Student Questionnaire; (2) Fourth Grade Home…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

Although the Federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a ten-year student-level panel data set from North Carolina, the authors examine how school-specific…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…

Three main purposes provided the foundation for this study. The first purpose was to investigate academic achievement through analyses of data obtained through formal and informal assessments among kindergarten through eighth grade students who participated in a Head Start program, center-based care program, or home-based care prior to school…

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University conducted a large-scale analysis of the impact of charter schools on student performance. The center's data covered 65-70% of the nation's charter schools. Although results varied by state, 17% of the charter school students have significantly higher math results than …

"How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement" estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school and investigates the characteristics of charter schools associated with the most positive effects on achievement. Because the report relies on an…

This study examined comparability of student scores obtained from computerized and paper-and-pencil formats of the large-scale statewide end-of-course (EOC) examinations in the two subject areas of Algebra and Biology. Evidence in support of comparability of computerized and paper-based tests was sought by examining scale scores, item parameter…

The study evaluated the comparability of two versions of a certification test: a paper-and-pencil test (PPT) and computer-based test (CBT). An effect size measure known as Cohen's d and differential item functioning (DIF) analyses were used as measures of comparability at the test and item levels, respectively. Results indicated that the effect…