Background: Many in education argue for the importance of incorporating teacher judgements in the assessment and reporting of student performance. Advocates of such an approach are cognisant, though, that obtaining a satisfactory level of consistency in teacher judgements poses a challenge. Purpose: This study investigates the extent to which the…

This report provides a comprehensive summary of statistical data on the state of education in Alabama. It is divided into eight sections: (1) General school information (students, staffing); (2) State accountability (adequate yearly progress status, adequate yearly progress summary); (3) Student academic performance (Alabama reading and…

This ERIC Digest was adapted from the Association for Childhood Education International's (ACEI) 1991 position paper on standardized testing. Since the publication of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, standardized testing programs have expanded greatly. Tests may be of pencil-and-paper or performance-oriented varieties. The purposes of tests…

Authentic evaluation of educational achievement directly measures actual performance in the subject area. Standardized multiple-choice tests, on the other hand, measure test-taking skills directly, and everything else indirectly or not at all. Also called performance assessment, appropriate assessment, alternative assessment, or direct assessment,…

The purpose of this study was to compare how learning outcomes are influenced by a number of key student composition (language background, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender) and school context variables on a direct writing performance assessment. The sample was randomly selected from a population of 13,604 third graders in 175 public…

Explores issues of whose work is actually being evaluated when raters outside the classroom context make judgments about students based on work composed with the support of peers, teachers, and parents. Data from an evaluation of a statewide assessment and a study of scoring elementary school writing portfolios illustrate the issues. (SLD)

A research project was conducted in Washington State in 1992 to develop an assessment system that could be used by adult basic education (ABE) and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs to satisfy accountability requirements and to provide assessment information useful for classroom instruction. In this preliminary work, 35 ABE/ESL programs…

The experience of the Colorado Springs (Colorado) Public Schools (CSPS) in using different assessment forms for different purposes is detailed. A small niche is reserved for national norm-referenced testing to fill the state achievement testing mandate and for Chapter 1 accountability. A second, and larger, part of the assessment program will be…