As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

As the tenth anniversary of NCLB has come and gone, both new and experienced educators continue to wrestle yearly with the standardized testing culture that has pervaded the educational experience of nearly every American child and teacher. Despite the requests for waivers to exempt certain states from NCLB, the majority of students and their…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation spawned a plethora of standardized testing services for all the high stakes testing required by the law. We argue that one-size-fits all assessments disadvantage students who are English Language Learners, in the USA, as well as students with limited economic resources, special needs, and not reading on…

Despite the extensive testing for federal accountability mandates, college students' understanding of federal accountability testing (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Spellings) has not been examined, resulting in a lack of knowledge regarding how such understanding (or lack thereof) impacts college students' behavior on accountability…

Federal policy on alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAS) inspired this research. Specifically, an experimental study was conducted to determine whether tests composed of modified items would have the same level of reliability as tests composed of original items, and whether these modified items helped reduce…

No matter where teachers, state officials, and testing experts stand on the debate about school accountability, they generally agree that the United States' current multiple-choice-dominated Kinder-12 tests are, to use language borrowed from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, "in need of improvement." Now, federal officials are…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through "The Nation's Report Card," the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students…

New technology-enabled assessments offer the potential to understand more than just whether a student answered a test question right or wrong. Using multiple forms of media that enable both visual and graphical representations, these assessments present complex, multistep problems for students to solve and collect detailed information about an…

This report describes the purposes of benchmark assessments and provides recommendations for selecting and using benchmark assessments--addressing validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and bias and accessibility, instructional sensitivity, utility, and reporting issues. We also present recommendations on building capacity to support schools'…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…

Twenty-three states are expanding their testing programs to additional grades this school year to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. In devising the new tests, most states have defied predictions and chosen to go beyond multiple-choice items, by including questions that ask students to construct their own responses. But many state…

Student assessment has long been a major component of the tasks that teachers perform. As such, it is important that school leaders consider teachers' assessment strategies as part of the normal supervisory process. In a political climate ruled by the No Child Left Behind Act, one important consideration is how well teachers' assessments prepare…

At the heart of No Child Left Behind's accountability system is the requirement that states test nearly every public school student in grades 3-8 and in one high school grade in reading and math. The magnitude of NCLB's testing requirements, the law's demanding deadlines, insufficient federal funding, and other factors have produced an undesirable…

Current educational policy highlights the important role that assessment can play in improving education. State standards and the assessments that are aligned with them establish targets for learning and promote school accountability for helping all students succeed; at the same time, feedback from assessment results is expected to provide …