Because public schools do not randomly assign students and teachers across schools (a methodological utopia), multilevel evaluation methods which account for student and school contextual and practice variables in their natural settings provide the most rigorous means for showing empirically what is actually happening in school classrooms.…

This paper explores the application of a technique for hierarchical item response theory (IRT) calibration of complex constructed response tasks that has promise both as a calibration tool and as a means of evaluating the isomorphic equivalence of complex constructed response tasks. Isomorphic tasks are explicitly and rigorously designed to be…

Methods for predicting specific college course grades, based on small numbers of observations, were investigated. These methods use collateral information across potentially diverse institutions to obtain refined within-group parameter estimates. One method, referred to as pooled least squares with adjusted intercepts, assumes that slopes and…

Two methods of using collateral information from similar institutions to predict college freshman grade average were investigated. One central prediction model, referred to as pooled least squares with adjusted intercepts, assumes that slopes and residual variances are homogeneous across selected colleges. The second model, referred to as Bayesian…