Statewide annual assessments are designed to help guide educational decisions by evaluating student growth and learning so resources can be equitably distributed. They also provide valuable individual results that summarize how each student is progressing against grade-level academic standards, identify additional ways their school system can…

PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its "policy lessons" are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that "seeing like PISA" is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education…

The present paper aims to discuss how data from international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) can be utilized and combined, even with other existing data sources, in order to monitor educational outcomes and study the effectiveness of educational systems. We consider different purposes of linking data, namely, extending outcomes measures,…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

The aim of this article is to analyse the direct and indirect effects that PISA generates in the orientation of educational policies and reforms in Spain and the ways in which PISA data and results are used in political discourses, at both national and sub-national levels. The main hypothesis of the article is that PISA results have played a key…

The study reported in this article examines how teachers read and respond to their students' Stanford Achievement Test 10 (SAT 10) scores with the goal of investigating the assumption that data-based teaching practice is more "objective" and less susceptible to divergent teacher interpretation. The study uses reader response theory to…

At the end of secondary education in The Netherlands, students have to pass a final examination, consisting of an internal school-based assessment and an external national assessment. According to the Dutch inspectorate, to ensure the quality of final examinations, the discrepancy between both assessments must be less than 0.5 points (on a scale…

Test developers are responsible to define how test scores should be interpreted and used. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) directed the Secretary of Education to use results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to confirm the proficiency scores from state developed tests. There are two sets of federal definitions…

In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education--that is, using various types of student data to inform decisions in schools and classrooms. In October 2008, the Council of the Great City Schools and American Institutes for Research (AIR) launched a project funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that focused…

For the last 3 years, more than 80% of the respondents to the "Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools" have stated that they would rather see a school's performance measure based upon "improvement shown by students" than the "percentage passing the test" (Rose & Gallup, 2007, p. 35). If this were to…

This case study offers an in-depth look at how one school achieved change in its culture and in its approach to curriculum and instruction. The unit of analysis for this single case study is South Loop Elementary School (SLES) and the time period is from August 2002 to June of 2007, during which SLES students demonstrated sharply improved…

A brief history of Title I evaluation efforts in Chicago illustrates the concern that the evaluation of Title I programs must serve two masters: the federal reporting mandate and local needs. (PN)

Discusses the actual uses to which achievement test scores are put in the college admissions process (according to survey findings) and factors that should be considered when treating test scores as admission criteria. (PGD)

Describes the range of policies, criteria, and weightings used in the process of selecting among candidates for admission in 19 public and private colleges and universities. Notes the need for adequate communications between colleges and the schools previously attended by candidates. (PGD)

Examines the validity of large-scale educational assessment, suggesting that construct validity is insufficient for assuming an achievement measure's internal validity and that the uses of assessment results affect external validity. Discusses the role of learning theory in large-scale assessment, purposes of large-scale assessment, item types and…