The purpose of the present study is to investigate 1) the teachers' beliefs about classroom assessment in English, 2) their actual classroom practices, and 3) the extent to which their beliefs are congruent with their actual assessment practices. The participants were grade-6 English teachers in a school district from the northeastern part of…

In practice, vertical scales have been continually used to measure students' achievement progress across several grade levels and have been considered very challenging psychometric procedures. Recently, such practices have been drawing many criticisms. The major criticisms focus on dimensionality and construct equivalence of the latent trait or…

Year-to-year rater variation may result in constructed response (CR) parameter changes, making CR items inappropriate to use in anchor sets for linking or equating. This study demonstrates how rater severity affected the writing and reading scores. Rater adjustments were made to statewide results using an item response theory (IRT) methodology…