Cheating attracts a significant amount of attention in conversations about assessment, and with good reason: if students cheat, we cannot be sure they have met the learning outcomes of their course. In this conceptual article we question the attention given to cheating as a concept and argue that the broader concept of validity is a more important…

The purpose of this report is to investigate the feasibility of constructing a school-level measure of students' academic growth from kindergarten to grade 3, and to assess the validity and precision of that measure. The study measured schoolwide student growth for reading and math using student growth percentiles based on Maryland's 2014/15…

Gargani and Strong claim to have developed and validated an observation system that requires only 4 hr of training, but one that can identify effective teachers using just 20 min of one video-taped lesson. They further contend that their six-item inventory requires little judgment from those who use it. They describe their instrument, the Rapid…

The "5Essentials Survey" is one of the few validated instruments to measure school climate. Schools that are strong in at least three of the five essential supports are up to 10 times more likely to experience substantial gains in students' math and reading scores. More than 6,000 schools nationwide have administered the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper, three-study research project, is to establish and validate a two-dimensional scale to measure teachers' and school administrators' accountability disposition. Design/methodology/approach: The scale items were developed in focus groups, and the final measure was tested on various samples of Israeli teachers and…

The use of test scores as a performance measure in high-stakes educational accountability has become increasingly popular since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which imposed sanctions such as the threat of losing federal funds unless a state implemented a school accountability system that measures student progress…

We used multilevel analysis to examine the predictive validity of scores from the Framework for Teaching (FFT), the observation measure used most often to evaluate teachers' instruction. We investigated how well 81 kindergarten teachers' FFT scores for eight reading and eight mathematics lessons observed throughout the year predicted students'…

The "5Essentials Survey" is one of the few validated instruments to measure school climate. Schools that are strong in at least three of the five essential supports are up to 10 times more likely to experience substantial gains in students' math and reading scores. More than 6,000 schools nationwide have administered the…

Accountability mandates often prompt assessment of student learning gains (e.g., value-added estimates) via achievement tests. The validity of these estimates have been questioned when performance on tests is low stakes for students. To assess the effects of motivation on value-added estimates, we assigned students to one of three test consequence…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides greater flexibility in state accountability systems than did previous federal legislation. In response, many states continue to refine their accountability systems to include college readiness tests, including college admissions and placement exams. This paper summarizes perspectives of K-12…

The insider security threat causes new and dangerous dimensions in cloud computing. Those internal threats are originated from contractors or the business partners' input that have access to the systems. A study of trustworthiness and transparency might assist the organizations to monitor employees' activity more cautiously on cloud technologies…

This article examines a government attempt to impose testing of 4-year-olds as a baseline against which to "hold primary schools accountable" for children's subsequent progress. It examines the various forms of baseline testing in this experiment and analyses the misleading claims made for the "predictive validity" of baseline…

This article describes key findings from contemporary research on screening for early primary grade students in the area of mathematics. Existing studies were used to illustrate the constructs most worth measuring and the diverse strategies that researchers used to study potential measures. The authors discussed the strengths and weaknesses of…

One outcome of the implementation of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its call for better accountability in public schools across the nation has been the use of student assessment data in measuring schools' effectiveness. In general, inferences about schools' effectiveness depend on the type of statistical model used to link student assessment…

We use longitudinal data from Washington State to provide estimates of the extent to which performance on the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, is predictive of the likelihood of employment in the teacher workforce and value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. While edTPA scores are highly…