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…

Given the relatively high intercorrelations observed between mathematics achievement, reading achievement, and cognitive ability, it has recently been claimed that student assessment studies (e.g., TIMSS, PISA) and intelligence tests measure a single cognitive ability that is practically identical to general intelligence. The present article uses…

Management of the California Demonstration Program in Reading, a project designed to give educationally disadvantaged students at the junior high and middle school level a second chance to learn basic reading and math skills, is described. Material is divided into 18 sections covering program goals, instructional strategies, personnel,…

The Language Assessment Battery was administered to third to fifth grade limited English speaking students in New York City. Special techniques addressed two common problems in testing these populations: (1) language tests suitable for limited English speakers change their psychometric characteristics over time as the students' language ability…

This document, one of 12 guides that have been developed to facilitate evaluation by and for local education agency (LEA) personnel in Illinois, covers vocational needs assessment to identify discrepancies between the needs of the community and the school programs available to meet those needs. The guide has been designed to aid the person who has…

Ten brief case studies illustrate the types of arrangements which have been made between commissions and evaluators, and describe some of the subsequent problems. Each of the cases is a major evaluative study of a large-scale educational development or school operation. For the collection as a whole, the purpose was to illustrate how the…

As part of Project IMPACT's effort to identify and develop procedures for complying with the impact requirements of Public Law 94-482, a field study was conducted to identify and validate variables and their order of importance in predicting and evaluating impact of research and development (R&D) projects in vocational and technical education.…

This paper describes each of eight current interrelated federally funded research projects conducted by the Research and Training Center for Children's Mental Health at the University of South Florida. For each project, information is provided on the project's background, purpose, methodology, and anticipated results. Project titles and principal…

This report reviews the evidence for the effectiveness of different kinds of family support services, focusing on services in the United Kingdom, particularly for families who are disadvantaged or experiencing particular difficulties in their lives. The report also describes different evaluation methods and presents information on various measures…

Classroom teachers, specialists and school principals will find this "List of Assessment Resources for English as a Second Language (ESL)" useful for determining the level of instruction for new students, measuring student growth, communicating about student learning, and for applying for ESL funding and for special considerations on…

School districts, individual schools, and education policies all contribute to student achievement. But it can be argued that the most important contributing factor is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Evaluating teacher quality is complicated, yet it has become even more important with the testing and assessment focus of No Child Left…

Writing is one of the main means of assessment in tertiary institutions and helping students with writing could improve their overall academic performance and could ensure that students proceed to graduation. More and more, Academic Development initiatives are being "driven to demonstrate their "success" by substantiating the rhetoric of their…

Why and under which conditions do international student assessment programmes like PISA have success? How can the results of these assessments be useful for advocates of different, even contradictory, policies? What might explain different patterns of using assessment as a tool for school governance? Drawing on historical and comparative research,…

This study focuses on an evaluation project that served as a powerful professional development experience for teachers and leaders in a network of Chicago small schools. The network of small schools led by the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative is based on the Authentic Intellectual Achievement (AIA) framework originally conceived by Fred…

Objective: To review and provide details about the primary and secondary findings from the Multimodal Treatment study of ADHD (MTA) published during the past decade as three sets of articles. Method: In the second of a two part article, we provide additional background and detail required by the complexity of the MTA to address confusion and…