Every day, people use data to make decisions that affect their personal and professional lives, trusting that the data are correct. Many times, however, the data are inaccurate, as a result of a flaw in the design or methodology of the survey used to collect the data. Researchers agree that only questions that are clearly worded, unambiguous, free…

This dissertation comprises three papers that propose, discuss, and illustrate models to make improved inferences about research questions regarding student achievement in education. Addressing the types of questions common in educational research today requires three different "extensions" to traditional educational assessment: (1)…

The purpose of this paper was to describe the process of development of assessment instruments for the Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project. The COSMIC project was a three-year longitudinal comparative study focusing on evaluating high school students' mathematics learning from two distinct…

Mixture modeling is a widely applied data analysis technique used to identify unobserved heterogeneity in a population. Despite mixture models' usefulness in practice, one unresolved issue in the application of mixture models is that there is not one commonly accepted statistical indicator for deciding on the number of classes in a study…

For decades traditional methods of testing have been criticized for saying relatively little reliably about students' ability as well as causing anxiety, which can negatively affect students' recall of learned information. The reform movement with its innovative approaches focusing on learner-centered education perceives assessment as an…

A procedure was developed to combine subsets of curriculum-relevant items from a norm-referenced achievement test (NRT) with items comprising a locally-developed supplementary test in order to produce objective-referenced test (ORT) data for program evaluation. The study was designed to determine whether the ORTs were valid instruments for program…

In July 2001, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) agreed to the development of assessment instruments and key performance measures for reporting on student skills, knowledge and understandings in primary science. It directed the newly established Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce…

In 2003 the first nationally-comparable science assessment was designed, developed and carried out under the auspices of the national council of education ministers, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). In 2006 a second science assessment was conducted and, for the first time nationally, the…

In July 2001, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) agreed to the development of assessment instruments and key performance measures for reporting on student skills, knowledge and understandings in primary science. It directed the newly established Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce…