Are teachers who are faced with mandated assessments more likely or less likely to explore their students' performance in depth and use their discoveries to enrich learning? This is the story of how six first-grade teachers in New York City responded to a mandated performance assessment--and how that response compared to a set of informal,…

The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which indicators on the language and literacy and mathematical thinking domains of a curriculum-embedded performance assessment functioned differently for urban, African American and White male students. A sample of 852 first-grade male students in a large urban school district, located in…