Special education teachers play a key role in educational assessment practices, including frequently administering norm-referenced tests of academic achievement. This study examined the course on norm-referenced assessment provided in special education training programs. Data regarding course: (1) structure; (2) assignments; (3) test…

Background/Context: Previous research in educational assessment has consistently emphasized the importance of reliability as a cornerstone of test quality. Traditional measures of reliability, such as test-retest and split-half reliability, offer a broad view of how internally consistent a measure is but overlook the variability in this internal…

Educational standards have become a popular choice for setting clear educational targets for students. The language of standards is that they are "objective" as opposed to typical tests which may suffer from bias. This article seeks to further analyze the claims that standards are objective and fair to all. The author focuses on six…

Adaptive behavior scales are vital in assessing children and adolescents who experience a range of disabling conditions in school settings. This article presents the results of an evaluation of the design characteristics, norming, scale characteristics, reliability and validity evidence, and bias identification studies supporting 14…

Federal education legislation continues to emphasize the role of assessment in elementary and secondary schools. Perhaps most prominently, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; P.L. 114-95), requires the use of test-based educational accountability systems in states and specifies the…

Teachers committed to inclusive education have the potential to revolutionise pedagogical and assessment practices within regular classrooms simply because students with high needs challenge traditional assumptions about what it means "to learn" and "to assess". This creates opportunities for teachers to find creative ways to…

This guide attempts to address an aspect of secondary CTE (Career and Technical Education) that has received little attention; the assessment literacy of educators. School leaders need to go beyond ensuring routine compliance with external and internal regulatory forces to identify ways in which CTE program teachers might better understand…

This paper investigates whether inferences about school performance based on longitudinal models are consistent when different assessments and metrics are used as the basis for analysis. Using norm-referenced (NRT) and standards-based (SBT) assessment results from panel data of a large heterogeneous school district, we examine inferences based on…

In this report, student growth percentiles and percentile growth projections/trajectories are introduced as a means of understanding student growth in both normative and a criterion referenced ways. With these values calculated, the author shows how growth data can be utilized in both a norm- and in a criterion-referenced manner to inform…

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the nation's oldest and largest urban school choice program, offering private-school scholarships to low-income students in the city of Milwaukee since 1990. In the early years of the program, voucher schools were not required to test their students, though many of them did so using nationally normed…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

This technical brief describes the large-scale assessment measures and practices used in the jurisdictions served by the Pacific Regional Educational Laboratory. The need for effective large-scale assessment was identified as a major priority for improving student achievement in the Pacific Region jurisdictions: American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, the…

Standards-based reform, as codified by the No Child Left Behind Act, relies on the ability of assessments to accurately reflect the learning that takes place in U.S. classrooms. However, this property of assessments--their instructional sensitivity--is rarely, if ever, investigated by test developers, states, or researchers. In this paper, the…

Recent legislative and local school accountability efforts have placed a premium on the collection, analysis, and use of student assessment data. Beyond state-based summative student achievement data, schools are searching for in-year information about student performance. As a result, school leaders are searching for the formative assessment…

ACT is often asked whether student scores on the ACT[R] test can be used to make "norm-referenced" or "standards-referenced" comparisons. Norm-referenced interpretations compare students to one another, while standards-referenced interpretations measure student performance against predefined content standards. This brief shows…