This report presents the findings of an analysis of states' FFY 2018 State Systemic Improvement Plans (SSIPs), submitted to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in April 2020. It specifically addresses how assessments were included in states' State-Identified Measurable Results (SIMRs). For states with…

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…

When students do not score well on standardized tests, their school can suffer. In an attempt to improve standardized test scores, a district placed students into a program called Seminar to help them work on weak areas of content through personalized instruction. The purpose of this project study was to assess if the Seminar program had a…

The Early Assessment Program (EAP) has emerged as a national model for states seeking to design policies that increase the number of students who leave high school ready for college and careers. In addition, the two national consortia designing new assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards have recognized the EAP as a model for the…

This summary of the history and current workings of the New York Citywide reading test program emphasizes the educational consequences of it. The testing program has become controversial since its inception as a political compromise for school district decentralization. It seems to have become overly influential because children are prepared for…

Summarizing a two-part general report on a reading assessment of grades 8 and 12 in the province of British Columbia, this report provides the general background on the aims and methods of the assessment, presents information on the development of the test instrument, details the administration of the test, and reports its results. In addition,…

The adoption by Seattle (Washington) Public Schools of the Prescriptive Reading Inventory Reading System (PRI-RS) was a decision driven by the district's commitment to effective schooling. The PRI-RS is a criterion referenced approach to the instruction and assessment of reading skills, and it consists of five levels, A through E, coordinated with…

Results from three small-scale investigations of specific aspects of bilingual schooling as well as results of a more traditional large-scale evaluation of bilingual education programs in downstate Illinois are presented. The three small studies were designed to assess natural language in the classroom, compare criterion-referenced versus…

The Houston Job Training Partnership Council's (HJTPC) Summer Basic Training Programs consisted of eight-week summer training programs at 14 sites that were provided by six organizations under contracts. Evaluation of the program involved pre-testing and post-testing at each site on achievement in reading, mathematics, and writing; pre-testing and…

Apart from the annual returns to the Ministry of Education of Reading Recovery (RR) data (and to a lesser extent, the four-yearly National Education Monitoring Project cycle data), there is currently no national data sets of reading achievement information for New Zealand primary school children. This article uses the national RR data for 2002 as…

The focus of this study was to assess the 17-year-olds' ability to read functional reading tasks and to provide change if and where needed. This was a project between the Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin High Schools (MFHS) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the area of reading. Two hundred fourteen 17-year-olds were randomly…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 28 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) a method of individually appraising the precursory skills of beginning readers; (2) the effects of instructing third grade students in interpretive reading…

This report summarizes the evaluations of 15 schools in seven states that are using the Success for All program, an elementary school restructuring program that stresses prevention of learning problems and immediate intervention when learning problems do appear. The schools included those in Baltimore, Maryland, where the program was initiated,…

In the spring of 1985, the Oregon Department of Education conducted an assessment of eighth graders' skills in writing, reading, and mathematics. The state reading test consisted of two parts: the first designed to measure students' inferential and evaluative reading comprehension and selected study skills, the second designed to measure students'…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 34 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) elementary school reading comprehension instruction; (2) a language experience approach to remedial reading instruction with junior high school students, (3)…