The New Mexico Public Education Department developed the Kindergarten Observation Tool (KOT) as a multidimensional observational measure of students' knowledge and skills at kindergarten entry. The primary purpose of the KOT is to inform instruction, so that kindergarten teachers can use the information about their students' knowledge and skills…

These are the appendixes for the report "Children's Knowledge and Skills at Kindergarten Entry in Illinois: Results from the First Statewide Administration of the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey." At least half of states administer or are developing kindergarten entry assessments. In fall 2017 the Illinois State Board of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the measures that make up each of the three separate accountability indices of school performance in South Carolina could be used to create an overall, reliable index of school performance. Data from public elementary, middle, and high schools in 2012/13 were used in confirmatory factor…

Federal initiatives and other research have led states across the nation to sharpen their focus on teacher evaluation in recent years. In 2009 a seminal report, "The Widget Effect," from The New Teacher Project revealed that in districts using a binary rating system to evaluate teachers, less than 1 percent of teachers received an…

A growing number of states and school districts use school climate assessments in progress reporting systems and are interested in incorporating these assessments into accountability systems. This analysis of response data from middle school students and teachers on the California School Climate, Health, and Learning Survey examines the…

The New York City Department of Education's (DOE) annual survey of parents, students, and teachers is the largest of its kind in the United States. The DOE relies on the survey to identify schools' strengths and to target areas for improvement. School Survey scores, along with attendance, are also the only non-academic indicators used in the DOE's…

This paper presents the development and initial validation of new measures of critical thinking and noncognitive attributes that were designed to supplement existing standardized tests used in the admissions system for higher education in Chile. The importance of various facets of this process, including the establishment of technical rigor and…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, which take place every three years, have been designed to collect information about 15-year-old students in participating countries. PISA examines how well students are prepared to meet the challenges of the future,…

Three numerical coefficients for analyzing the validity and reliability of ratings are described. Each coefficient is computed as the ratio of an obtained to a maximum sum of differences in ratings. The coefficients are also applicable to the item analysis, agreement analysis, and cluster or factor analysis of rating-scale data. (Author/BW)

This study examined the internal consistency of the Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) (L. Schrener, S. Juillerat, and Noel-Levitz Group, 1997) and the latent structures of the instrument. The SSI is an instrument that measures students' satisfaction with their college experiences. The SSI was administered to 251 students randomly selected from…

Mastery of sixteen "life skills" tasks will be a Seattle Public Schools graduation requirement beginning in 1981. Five forms of the Minimum Competencies Performance Test, which will be used to measure mastery of those tasks, are presently being developed and field tested. This report presents the results of the analysis of the first…

This paper reports evidence on the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Chinese Family Assessment Instrument (C-FAI), an instrument developed to assess family functioning in Chinese populations. A convenience sample of 1,462 adolescents from junior secondary schools completed the C-FAI and measures of parent-adolescent conflict.…

Since its appearance in 1974, the Snyder Self-Monitoring Scale has been employed in research dealing with self-presentation, attribution, and attitude expression. The Scale was developed to measure the degree to which people are concerned with the social appropriateness of their behavior, are aware of relevant social cues, and regulate their…

This second volume of the final report contains the statistical tables, coding key, and the rating manual for the coding key. Data on interrater reliability, factor analyses, and discriminant analyses are included and described. The manual for the coding key includes the data base and/or criteria for each item to be coded. (MNS)

The study investigated the reliability and validity of professional groups using the Modified Component Disability Instrument to identify/evaluate learning disabled (LD) adolescents. Ss included 166 LD teachers, speech clinicians, remedial reading teachers, school psychologists, school principals, and school counselors. Calculations were made for…