Reading comprehension is the goal of reading, and making inferences is vital. Authors usually expect readers to make multiple types of inferences, including anaphoric, background knowledge, predictive, and retrospective. Common core assessments include all of these, yet instructional materials focus mostly on only one type, retrospective. This…

Students in the United States are struggling to show proficient comprehension in reading, with only 35% of the nation's fourth graders scoring proficient or higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2019. Since the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices &…

We use a quadratic equation to estimate trends in cohort performances in the charter and district sectors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 4th and 8th grade between 2005 and 2017. Data consist of over four million test observations of nationally representative samples of students on seven separate math and reading tests. We…

A new entry in the testing lexicon is through-course summative assessment, a system consisting of components administered periodically during the academic year. As defined in the Race to the Top program, these assessments are intended to yield a yearly summative score for accountability purposes. They must provide for both individual and group…

In "Updating the Duplex Design for Test-Based Accountability in the Twenty-First Century," Bejar and Graf (2010) propose extensions to the duplex design for large-scale assessment presented in Bock and Mislevy (1988). Examining the range of people who use assessment results--from students, teachers, administrators, curriculum designers,…

Despite students' interest in informational text, it has played second fiddle in literacy instruction for years. Now, though, nonfiction is getting its turn in the spotlight. The Common Core State Standards require that students become thoughtful consumers of complex, informative texts--taking them beyond the realm of dry textbooks and…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

Many mathematics teachers struggle to support their students' developing understanding of proof as an essential element in investigations of mathematics. The area of mathematics where the development of an understanding of proof is most challenging is algebra. In the case of algebraic proof, analysis of student written work on tasks that demand…

During the past decade, the percentage of proficient students (PPS) has become the primary indicator of school performance. Educators use the PPS to monitor changes in performance over time, compare performance across groups, and assess trends in achievement gaps. The PPS is relatively new, first used with the National Assessment of Educational…

This study examines the practical implications of using state tests to measure student achievement in impact evaluations that span multiple states and grades. In particular, the study examines the sensitivity of impact findings to (1) the type of assessment used to measured achievement (state tests or an external assessment administered by the…

Xu and von Davier (2006) demonstrated the feasibility of using the general diagnostic model (GDM) to analyze National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency data. Their work showed that the GDM analysis not only led to conclusions for gender and race groups similar to those published in the NAEP Report Card, but also allowed…

The unfulfilled promise of criterion-referenced measurement is that it would permit valid inferences about what a student could and could not do. To come closest to achieving all that criterion-referenced testing originally promised, tests of higher item density, with more items per amount of domain, are required. (SLD)