This report shares with educators and the public all of the test items on which spring 2002 student results from the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) are based. The release of these items provides information on the kinds of knowledge and skills students are expected to demonstrate on the MCAS tests. Local educators are…

This study provides data from 11 adult correctional institutions on the percentage of residents who took standardized tests--educational, intelligence, vocational, and psychological tests--over a one-year period. Many individual differences in institutions are noted. (Author)

Describes the procedures by which Kentucky's state assessment program synthesized results from three standard setting procedures (Contrasting Groups, Bookmark, and Jaeger-Mills) for the 2000 state assessment. Shows the value of using multiple standard-setting approaches to gather information from each. (SLD)

The No Child Left Behind Act sanctions the use of NAEP scores to confirm state testing results. The U.S. Department of Education, as test developer, is responsible to set forth how NAEP scores are to be interpreted and used. Thus far, the Department has not published a clear set of guidelines for using NAEP achievement level scores to conduct a…

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting…

This article supports Edward Haertel's views on inappropriate use of student test scores in evaluating teachers. Tests scores may identify a few incompetent teachers, but may bring new ailments to schools. The article argues that even the system proposed by Haertal may become subject to abuse by mechanistic or autocratic administrative practices.…

It is argued that publishers of achievement tests, especially those who publish tests intended for use in many parts of the United States, are for the most part not in a position to obtain any decent evidence about the consequences of the uses that are made of their tests. What responsibilities and actions publishers can reasonably be expected to…

This overview of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests is designed to help schools implement the Massachusetts"Curriculum Frameworks." For this fourth administration of the MCAS tests in 2001, the design of the tests remains essentially the same, but there are some changes highlighted in this overview. The first…

Interviewed testing coordinators in 20 New Jersey public schools to identify and describe current practices and problems in testing program content, planning, and participation; test selection and scheduling; preparation of test administrators and test takers; and test scoring, recording, and reporting. (JAC)

The objectives of this paper are threefold. First, a model is proposed for unifying massive amounts of conceptual and numerical information flowing from the measures of the accountability movement in Ohio and the materials that are publicly available to educators. Second, this model is translated into useable forms of information that help…

Investigated how well the generalized and Rasch models described item and test performance across a broad range of mixed-item-format test configurations (six tests from two state proficiency testing programs). Evaluating the impact of model assumptions on the predictions of item and test information permitted a delineation of the implications of…

This article discusses the five studies included in this issue. Each article addressed the same topic, population invariance of equating. They all used data from major standardized testing programs, and they all used essentially the same statistics to evaluate their results, namely, the root mean square difference and root expected mean square…

This article reports on reactions to the U.S. Department of Education's first time decision to sit out an international study designed to show how advanced high school students around the world measure up in math and science. Mark S. Schneider, the commissioner of the department's National Center for Education Statistics, which normally takes the…

ACT maintains that monitoring academic strengths and weaknesses through the effective use of results from standardized tests can promote learning and intellectual growth. When schools use achievement test scores to guide curriculum choices and to provide feedback to students, opportunities for learning increase. The ACT Educational Planning and…