In recent decades, much attention has been focused on student achievement in the United States. Many policy initiatives have been attempted in an effort to bolster achievement, including increasing school revenue, decreasing class size, expanding early childhood programs, and introducing vouchers and charter schools, to name a few, but not all of…

Chapter 1 examines the effects of college quality on students' learning, employment and earnings in Colombia. Scores on a national college "entry" test solely determine admission to many selective Colombian universities, creating exogenous peer and resource quality variation near admission cutoffs. In one regression discontinuity (RD)…

Two projects that have explored the feasibility of computer-generated verbal score reports for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills are reported. The first, the Madison Project, designed, produced, and evaluated computer-generated testing reports that were useful to teachers and informative to parents. The reports, which were narrative in format, were…

This 4-part document provides an overview of educational evaluation. Part I outlines the problems in educational evaluation, distinguishing between evaluations of student performance (objective attainment) and those of system operation (cost-effectiveness). Part II reviews existing practices in educational evaluation, focusing on the evaluation of…

PRIMARY FINDINGS OF OVER 30 STUDIES DATING FROM 1960 TO 1967, INCLUDING RESEARCH REPORTS, PROGRAM DESCRIPTIONS, AND THEORETICAL FORMULATIONS, ARE SYNTHESIZED IN AN EVALUATION OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE ON THE DETERMINANTS OF ACHIEVEMENT IN PUBLIC ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEMS. FOCUS OF THE SURVEY IS ON DETERMINING INPUTS AND OUTPUTS OF…