In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…

There is strong theoretical support for oral reading fluency (ORF) as an essential building block of reading proficiency. The current and standard ORF assessment procedure requires that students read aloud a grade-level passage (˜ 250 words) in a one-to-one administration, with the number of words read correctly in 60 seconds constituting their…

Assessing the achievement of students in elementary and secondary schools and the nation's educational progress is fundamental to informing education policy approaches. Congressional interest in this area includes and extends beyond the annual assessments administered by states to comply with the educational accountability requirements of Title…

Recent studies indicate that examiners make a number of intentional and unintentional errors when administering reading assessments to students. Because these errors introduce construct-irrelevant variance in scores, the fidelity of test administrations could influence the results of evaluation studies. To determine how assessment fidelity is…

Tests of reading comprehension presently used do not provide one important item of technical data: the extent to which questions used in the test could be answered without reading the paragraphs upon which those questions are based (paragraph dependency). This leaves the test user guessing as to whether the students taking the test and performing…

This study examines how third and fourth grade children work with a representative sample of test items designed to measure reading comprehension. The developmental and ethnocultural problems that children experience (whether they are rooted in the passage, the tasks, or the entire item) are discussed. From a passage-based perspective, the items…

A study involving all students taking the California Achievement Test (CAT) in the Cleveland City School District (Ohio) during the fall of 1989 was conducted to assess the effects of the use of parallel test forms. Each spring, all students in grades 4, 6, and 8 are selected to take the appropriate level of the CAT reading test, Form E. As a…

An assessment of the Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) City-Wide Testing Program is presented to determine the effects of using customized achievement tests to achieve multiple purposes. The tests are derived from, or related to, the tests in a nationally standardized test battery, but include items written specifically to measure the local curriculum.…

Reading and mathematics tests of the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Tests were modified to accomodate handicapped students, in order to determine whether or not students would perform better on the modified test forms. Changes were made in the format of the test booklets, answer sheets, and administration instructions to accomodate the following…

The National Academy of Education Panel is providing the intellectual leadership and coordination for an independent evaluation of the 1990 and 1992 Trial State Assessments (TSA) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These instruments provide state-by-state comparisons of educational achievement, which is the first such use of…