Although the number of countries conducting large-scale assessments has increased significantly over the past two decades, this has not necessarily led to the effective use of learning assessment data in policy-making and planning. To better understand the reasons for this, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)…

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the U.S. education system in both immediate and long-term ways, calling into question how K-12 accountability will function in the 2020-21 school year and well into the future. States face considerable uncertainty about how to meet federal and state accountability requirements for this school year and beyond. It…

Large-scale learning assessments can be used to generate performance and contextual data on student learning outcomes. They can be national, regional, or international; school based or household based. The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has conducted a qualitative study to explore both how and why learning…

Using data on secondary school social studies teachers (n = 6,702) from the Survey of the Status of Social Studies (S4), a multilevel model, and an Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis, this study examined the associations of state testing policy and school characteristics on secondary social studies teachers' instructional autonomy as it relates…

Bully victimization is associated with lower academic performance for individual students; however, less is known about the impact of bullying on the academic performance of the school as a whole. This study examined how retrospective administrator reports of both the prevalence of teasing and bullying (PTB) and the use of evidence-based bullying…

This article is a commentary on Australia's involvement in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. It provides a rationale for Australia's participation in the PISA programme, the influences of PISA involvement on education policies and practices, and considerations and implications for school leaders and education…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, large-scale assessments have come to play a central role in federal and state education accountability systems. Teachers and parents have expressed a number of concerns about their state testing programs, such as too much time devoted to testing and the high-stakes use of testing for teacher evaluation.…

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…

Recently, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) completed a study to connect the scale of the North Carolina State End of Grade (EOG) Testing Program used for North Carolina's mathematics and reading assessments with NWEA's Rausch Interval Unit (RIT) scale. Information from the state assessments was used in a study to establish…

This paper examines annual changes in the participation of developing countries in three kinds of learning assessment activity over the past three decades. It specifically highlights, and provides initial explanations for, the worldwide spread of national and regional assessments since the mid-1990s. The paper argues that national learning…

This paper is part of a series investigating the implementation of competency education. The purpose of the paper is to explore how districts and schools can redesign grading systems to best help students to excel in academics and to gain the skills that are needed to be successful in college, the community, and the workplace. In order to make the…

Despite a pending policy change aimed at including more students with disabilities and English-language learners (ELLs) in the "nation's report card," the federal agency that administers the national testing program appears to be softening the penalty for states that fail to improve inclusion rates. The disagreement underscores the…

Australian legislation and educational policies may espouse, but not yet fully enact, inclusive assessments for all. In relation to the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), for example, almost 5% of students are either exempt or withdrawn. The achievement levels of these students, many of whom have disabilities, are not…

Ten years have passed since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced…

This mixed-methods case study focuses on the third through fifth grade classrooms at a public elementary school in a Midwestern urban school district where the Northwest Evaluation Association's (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment is being implemented. According to the school district, the goals of these tests are: to show…