There is growing interest among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in identifying teachers who are skilled at improving student outcomes beyond test scores. However, questions remain about the validity of these teacher effect estimates. Leveraging the random assignment of teachers to classes, I find that teachers have causal effects on…

Like instruments used in afterschool programs to assess children's social and emotional growth or to evaluate staff members' performance, instruments used to evaluate program quality should be free from bias. Practitioners and researchers alike want to know that assessment instruments, whatever their type or intent, treat all people fairly and do…

This study involves the development and validation of a survey that measures college students' digital readiness for academic engagement in terms of their perceived digital competencies for academic work. Both exploratory and confirmatory analyses were employed to assess the factorial structure of the Digital Readiness for Academic Engagement…

This study explored the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Perceived Sense of School Membership (PSSM-18) Scale in two samples of South African adolescents. Principal components analysis (n = 1,052; males = 50.86%, M[subscript age] = 14.89, SD = 1.68) supported the retention of 15 items across a revised, three-factor structure of…

The interaction between language and the learning of statistical concepts has been receiving increased attention. The Communication, Language, And Statistics Survey (CLASS) was developed in response to the need to focus on dynamics of language in light of the culturally and linguistically diverse environments of introductory statistics classrooms.…

Purpose: It is critical to assess hospice professionals' discrimination between adaptive and maladaptive reactions to terminal illness in persons at the end-of-life to assure targeted intervention aimed at maintaining quality of life. The proposed measure, the Hospice Professionals Understanding of Preparatory Grief scale (HPPG), contains…

In this article, we present several modifications to the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics. The most significant changes are (i) the addition and removal of items to achieve parallelism in the objectives (dimensions) of the test, thus allowing comparisons of students' performance that were not possible with the original version, and (ii)…

This article reports the analysis of six urban contexts in which a practical tool measuring individual skills concerning household waste recycling was tested. The tool is a structured questionnaire including a simulation task that assesses respondents' abilities to sort household waste adequately in a given context/municipality. Results indicate…

Teacher adaptability is a key disposition for teachers that has been linked to outcomes of interests to schools. The aim of this study was to examine how the broader disposition of teacher adaptability might be observable as classroom-based adaptive practices using an argument-based approach to validation. The findings from the initial phase of…

The implementation of data-driven decision-making practices (DDDM) is a key component of contemporary teachers' professional practice. As such, the measurement of DDDM and related constructs is important for multiple purposes in both research and practice (e.g., identifying teacher needs around DDDM, and monitoring teacher change in response to…

This study reports on the national standardization and validation of the Learning Behaviors Scale (LBS) for use in Trinidad and Tobago. The LBS is a teacher rating scale centering on observable behaviors relevant to identifying childhood approaches to classroom learning. Teachers observed a stratified sample of 900 students across the islands'…

There has been a steady interest in investigating the validity of language tests in the last decades. Despite numerous studies on construct validity in language testing, there are not many studies examining the construct validity of a reading test. This paper reports on a study that explored the construct validity of the English reading test in…

These administrative rules of the Illinois Community College Board are divided into eight sections. Under Title 23: Education and Cultural Resources, Subtitle A: Education, Chapter VII: Illinois Community College Board: (1) Part 1501 Administration of the Illinois Public Community College Act; (2) Part 1502 Joint Rules of the Board of Higher…

The Vanderbilt Assessment for Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) is a 360-degree learning-centered behaviors principal evaluation tool that includes ratings from the principal, supervisors, and teachers. The current study assesses the test-retest reliability of the VAL-ED for a sample of seven school districts as part of multiple validity and…

The present research compares the operation of situational judgement and biodata measures between Chinese and U.S. respondents. We describe the development and past research on both measures, followed by hypothesized differences across the two groups of respondents. We base hypotheses on the nature of the Chinese and U.S. educational systems and…