The use of accommodations is often recommended to remove barriers to academic testing among English Learners (ELs). However, it is unclear whether accommodations are particularly effective at improving ELs' test scores. A growing foundation of empirical work has explored this topic. We conducted a meta-analysis that examined several possible…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- often called "The Nation's Report Card" -- is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in public and private schools in the United States know and can do in various subjects and has provided policy makers and the public with invaluable…

We compared students' performance on a paper-based test (PBT) and three computer-based tests (CBTs). The three computer-based tests used different test navigation and answer selection features, allowing us to examine how these features affect student performance. The study sample consisted of 9,698 fourth through twelfth grade students from across…

Nearly two dozen states now administer online exams. These tests have real consequences: their results feed into accountability systems, which have been used for more than a decade to hold schools and districts accountable for their students' learning. We examine the rollout of computer-based testing in Massachusetts over 2 years to investigate…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

In online educational systems we can easily collect and analyze extensive data about student learning. Current practice, however, focuses only on some aspects of these data, particularly on correctness of students answers. When a student answers incorrectly, the submitted wrong answer can give us valuable information. We provide an overview of…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third of countries in 2015. What accounts for this…

Content balancing is one of the most important components in the computerized adaptive testing (CAT) especially in the K to 12 large scale tests that complex constraint structure is required to cover a broad spectrum of content. The purpose of this study is to compare the weighted penalty model (WPM) and the weighted deviation method (WDM) under…

Web-based standard setting holds promise for reducing the travel and logistical inconveniences of traditional, face-to-face standard setting meetings. However, because there are few published reports of setting standards via remote meeting technology, little is known about the practical potential of the approach, including technical feasibility of…

There have been many studies of the comparability of computer-administered and paper-administered tests. Not surprisingly (given the variety of measurement and statistical sampling issues that can affect any one study) the results of such studies have not always been consistent. Moreover, the quality of computer-based test administration systems…

The primary goal of this study was to examine the relationship between deaf and hard-of-hearing students' learning style preferences and compare them to their nondeaf peers. Specifically, this study used 90 students throughout western Washington State, 45 per group. Quantitative data were collected using the 104-question survey Learning Style…

In recent years, computer-based testing (CBT) has grown in popularity, is increasingly being implemented across the United States, and will likely become the primary mode for delivering tests in the future. Although CBT offers many advantages over traditional paper-and-pencil testing, assessment experts, researchers, practitioners, and users have…

In this article, Structural communication grid (SCG), an alternative measurement and evaluation technique, has been firstly summarised and the design, development and implementation of a computer based SCG system have been introduced. The system is then tested on a sample of 154 participants consisting of candidate students, science teachers and…