In response to US accountability policies and yearly performance targets, school districts are implementing periodic or benchmark assessments to provide teachers with data to improve instruction and student achievement. The tests are typically given quarterly to track student progress toward yearly accountability goals, as well as to inform…

Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) released the first comprehensive study of assessment perceptions in 2012 that surveyed parents, teachers, and district administrators. In the intervening years, the landscape has shifted dramatically; indeed, it continues to shift every day. With new standards, accountability assessments, and ways of…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program is a series of periodic assessments administered nationally to samples of students and designed to measure different content areas. This article describes a multi-year study that focused on the breadth of the development, administration, maintenance, and renewal of the assessments in…

From the 1980s to the present, educational accountability in the United States has grown dramatically. Such accountability in U.S. school districts, although driven primarily by external demands, has internal manifestations as well. The chapter traces the historical development of internal evaluation in American school districts, then highlights…

There has been little data collected on how much testing actually goes on in America's schools and how the results are used. So in the Spring of 2014, the Council staff developed and launched a survey of assessment practices. This report presents the findings from that survey and subsequent Council analysis and review of the data. It also offers…

In view of social processes, politics and the logistics of conducting evaluations, several implicit assumptions of the field challenged by findings on innovation implementation are reviewed. These studies have major implications for evaluation practice, evaluator roles, the use of evaluation results, and the federal role in evaluation. (Author/CM)

The effects of a school district's testing and evaluation activities cannot be effectively assessed without an understanding of the explicit and implicit goals embedded in the policies and practices of the district. A structured workshop process to elicit a district's intentions related to the effects--uses and impacts--of testing and evaluation…

The idea that all curricula should reflect learnings that are common across subject areas has only recently been considered in British Columbia. Within the past year, the change in focus resulted from the British Columbia Ministry of Education's (BCME) adoption of a definition of an educated person as an ideal toward which educators should be…

This report describes how one of our nation's largest urban school systems works through the complexities of diverse testing programs, testing schedules, and students to produce timely results that help students, parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers to produce sound decisions about learning. (Author)

Yearly administrations of a standardized achievement test are a part of the educational process in many school districts in the United States. The Systemwide Testing Program in the Austin Independent School District Office of Research and Evaluation has gradually developed a process and support materials whereby the test administrations are a tool…

This guide contains information to help teachers understand and use reports from the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP). The DSTP is designed to be a measure of progress toward Delaware's content standards that helps ensure that students can apply their academic skills to realistic, everyday problems. The DSTP aims to promote better…

Since 1983 the Migrant Education Program Evaluation (MEPE) has collected data about migrant children in summer programs throughout the state of Illinois. Testing is done during the summer months with migrant students in grades 3, 5, and 7. Preliminary screening identifies students who are limited-English speakers, and they are excluded from…

Most states have expanded their statewide testing programs to include alternative educational assessments, and two (Kentucky and Maine) have completely abandoned the multiple-choice format. However, over half of states designing alternative assessments are encountering major difficulties related to the high cost of performance-based assessments,…

The strengths and weaknesses of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are discussed. The NAEP estimates the number of students who are more likely to do certain problems correctly than other students. NAEP reports the numbers, briefly describes the problems, and says that more students need to do these problems correctly. The…

Schools that are concerned with evaluating their programs need more than just the average scaled assessment scores from standardized tests. To help schools, the Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program produces school and district reports that contain the stories behind the averages. These reports describe the kind of students who took the…