With the growing attention on large-scale educational testing and assessment, the ability to process substantial volumes of response data becomes crucial. Current estimation methods within item response theory (IRT), despite their high precision, often pose considerable computational burdens with large-scale data, leading to reduced computational…

The process of quantification is a powerful development shaping many domains of life today. In the area of education, for example, performance measurement, testing and ranking have become common tools of governance. Quantification is not a neutral way of describing society, but a process of valorisation. It has three sociologically relevant…

When Superintendent Curtis Craig, Ed.S., came to the Rensselaer Central Schools Corporation in 2015, he discovered an assessment problem common to many districts. The assessment results--Renaissance STAR and Acuity at the time--were not well aligned to the new, more rigorous standards the district and state had recently adopted. In addition, some…

Purpose: In this study, Logistic Regression (LR), CHAID (Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection) analysis and data mining methods are used to investigate the variables that predict the mathematics success of the students. Research Methods: In this study, a quantitative research design was employed during the data collection and the analysis…

Educators at North Mason wanted a cohesive assessment plan for their district. With help from NWEA, they aligned assessments to appropriate purposes and began focusing on student growth.

As the quality of educational outputs has been problematized, accountability systems have driven reform based upon summative assessment data. These policies impact the ways that educators use data within schools and subsequently, how teacher education programs may adjust their curricula to teach data-driven decision-making to inform instruction.…

This report reviews the major international and regional large-scale educational assessments, including international surveys, school-based surveys and household-based surveys. The report compares and contrasts the cognitive and contextual data collection instruments and implementation methods used by the different assessments in order to identify…

Monitoring, evaluation, and quality assurance in their various forms are seen as being one of the foundation stones of high-quality education systems. De Grauwe, writing about "school supervision" in four African countries in 2001, linked the decline in the quality of basic education to the cut in resources for supervision and support.…

For educational achievement tests that employ multiple-choice (MC) items and aim to reliably classify students into performance categories, it is critical to design MC items that are capable of discriminating student performance according to the stated achievement levels. This is accomplished, in part, by clearly understanding how item design…

In the late 1990s, teachers in five pilot districts in Ohio were trained during the Baldrige in Education Initiative (BiE IN). Training included Baldrige's theory, quality process and quality tools. The study was a follow-up to determine the effect of the use of the Ohio Baldrige Initiative training in the pilot districts (and other early…

This article discusses the five studies included in this issue. Each article addressed the same topic, population invariance of equating. They all used data from major standardized testing programs, and they all used essentially the same statistics to evaluate their results, namely, the root mean square difference and root expected mean square…

Best Liked/Least Liked is a technique for collecting evaluation information. The technique is composed of stages (data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation) that are characterized by ease of use. Its use can be narrowly or broadly focused, and it can be used for achievement testing or affective measurement. (Author/PN)

Progress made on the development of a plan for evaluating the cost performance and educational benefits of the TICCIT and PLATO projects is summarized in this annual report. The basic focus of the first section of the report, Cost Analysis, is to provide answers to the fundamental question of how much these two CAI methods cost compared with some…

The collection of verbal reports is one way in which cognitive and developmental psychologists gather data to formulate and corroborate models of problem solving. The current use of verbal reports to design and validate educational assessments reflects the growing trend to fuse cognitive psychological research and educational measurement. However,…

The third (1978-79) of three writing assessments conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is reported. The writing achievement of American 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds was surveyed using a deeply stratified, multistage probability sample design. The specific procedures used in the assessment to develop objectives and…