The Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) offers high school students the opportunity to take rigorous coursework in high school and receive college credit for AP Exam scores that meet or exceed the requirements of their attending institution. Students receiving AP credit are typically exempted from an introductory-level course or series of courses…

The purpose of this study was to describe the measures used to evaluate principals in New Jersey in the first (pilot) year of the new principal evaluation system and examine three of the statistical properties of the measures: their variation among principals, their year-to-year stability, and the associations between these measures and the…

The judgmental approaches used by the Governing Board to set National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement levels have been the subject of a great deal of controversy and have sometimes led to results that were considered "unreasonable." The NCES requirement that the achievement levels be used on a trial basis and be…

A conceptual distinction is provided between conventional academic predictors and performance-based tests. Conventional academic predictors include grade average in prior education and academic achievement tests. Performance-based tests involve direct measures of a criterion. Subsequently, an empirical study is presented examining the incremental…

This paper reports on a study of the current state of the art in teaching assessment. The major goal of the study was to examine a sample of assessment systems and then develop a specification for a state-of the art performance assessment system to be used for human capital management functions. The authors hope was that this specification would…

The adoption of Common Core State Standards has increased the need for assessments capable of measuring more performance-based outcomes. This monograph brings together the current literature and resources for the development and implementation of performance assessment. The text was written as part of a project-based graduate course and has…

While externally moderated standards-based assessment has been practised in Queensland senior schooling for more than three decades, there has been no such practice in the middle years. With the introduction of standards at state and national levels in these years, teacher judgement as developed in moderation practices is now vital. This paper…

The performing arts studio is a highly complex learning setting, and assessing student outcomes relative to reliable and valid standards has presented challenges to this teaching and learning method. Building from the general international higher education literature, this article illustrates details, processes, and solutions, drawing on…

It is not unusual for interest groups to issue reports that further their own political agendas--and to muddle the facts in the process. For this reason, newspapers generally ignore them, treat them with great skepticism, or make sure they properly vet the research with independent observers. Not so in the case of the study of charter schools…

Criteria to guide classroom assessment practice are determine the extent to which assessment practices are based on tasks and activities that are representative of instructional intention and translate into specific information collection, interpretation, evaluation, and reporting procedures; address the accuracy of the assessment; and consider…

Studied the validity of teacher judgments based on the Work Sampling System (WSS), a curriculum-embedded performance assessment for preschool to grade 5. Results for 345 K-3 students in 17 classrooms demonstrate that the WSS correlates well with a standardized, individually administered psychoeducational battery and is a reliable predictor of…

Use of portfolios and performance tasks has exponentially increased as educators seek to be as "fair" as possible, and to link measurement, assessment, and evaluation more closely to cognition, curriculum, and instruction. However, high standards of reliability and validity are equally essential in the use of "authentic"…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

This book provides basic skills and knowledge about assessment so that teachers can expand their ability to deal with appraisal problems in their own settings. The first section deals with the basic principles of assessment. The second section concerns creating and applying assessment tools. The third section reviews issues in understanding and…

Using portfolios in assessing literacy is explored, considering student portfolios and the teacher's class portfolio. Portfolio assessment is a valuable complement to externally mandated tests, but technical issues must be addressed if the portfolio movement is to survive. Portfolios must be linked to the broader task of instructional improvement.…