Scores on annual statewide achievement tests can provide parents, students, educators, and policymakers with valuable information--but only if students participate. This issue brief provides the background about recent increases in (and efforts to expand) the number of students opting out of statewide assessments, describes the information and…

Professional development is an important part of creating a culture of continuous school improvement to maximize student learning. Rarely do we measure the impact of professional development on teacher learning, implementation and student outcomes. This study describes a professional development strategy for elementary teachers to promote…

IES is the primary research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Established through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), the Institute's mission is to expand fundamental knowledge and understanding of education and to provide education leaders and practitioners, parents and students, researchers, and…

In this study, the outcomes of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as implemented in Illinois, are evaluated in terms of high school standards testing results between 2003-2013. NCLB was a policy dedicated to closing the gap in schooling outcomes nationally in the space of a decade. There have been few systematic examinations of its macro-level results…

Increasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for decades, especially in formerly socialist countries. However, the transition to market economies led to significant restructuring of school systems and a decline in the number of vocational students. Exposing more students to a general curriculum…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to describe one Connecticut middle school's voluntary implementation of a data-driven decision making process in order to improve student academic performance. Data-driven decision making is a component of Connecticut's accountability system to assist schools in meeting the requirements of the No…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

In most large-scale assessments of student achievement, several broad content domains are tested. Because more items are needed to cover the content domains than can be presented in the limited testing time to each individual student, multiple test forms or booklets are utilized to distribute the items to the students. The construction of an…

This report focuses on the initial design, implementation and baseline results of the five-year Longitudinal Educational Growth Study (LEGS) of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) being conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP). The LEGS will be the first evaluation of the participant effects of the MPCP using…

In 1989 the National Association of State Directors of Migrant Education appointed a National Migrant Education Evaluation Committee to plan the development and implementation of a uniform nationwide migrant education needs assessment and evaluation system (MENAES). This report summarizes the committee's activities and recommendations. The…

This document describes the revision of the Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE) Program Evaluation Kit, including planning, development, and/or revisions of specific components. The kit is a set of books, originally developed in 1978, and designed to provide step-by-step procedural guides to help people conduct evaluations of educational…

As part of a statewide (Massachusetts) evaluation in all areas of education, the reading assessment summarized in this report tested all 9- and 17-year-old students in 31 school districts in an effort to examine student performance statewide as well as in the individual educational regions and communities. This report contains the following…

This 1982 supplement is a further elaboration to the Writing Assessment which was distributed in 1981 to assist schools in assessment of writing by detailing scoring procedures, standard-setting, and the reporting of results. The supplement deals with retesting, alternative methods for setting standards, establishing score equivalency on writing…

As part of a statewide (Massachusetts) evaluation in all areas of education, the reading assessment described in this report tested all 9- and 17-year-old students in 31 school districts in an effort to examine student performance statewide as well as in the individual educational regions and communities. The first four chapters of the report…

The Michigan Department of Education implemented a large-scale social action program through its Compensatory Education School Aid Act of SY 1971-72. Schools received $200 per pupil and were held accountable for pupil achievement. This paper describes the educational delivery systems in three urban schools, the evaluation of pupil achievement, and…