This paper informs users of data collected in international large-scale assessments (ILSA), by presenting argumentsunderlining the importance of considering two design features employed in these studies. We examine a commonmisconception stating that the uncertainty arising from the assessment design is negligible compared with that arisingfrom the…

Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of "efficiency" and "equity" in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted to them. In this article, an empirical…

In large-scale assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), plausible values based on Multiple Imputations (MI) have been used to estimate population characteristics for latent constructs under complex sample designs. Mislevy (1991) derived a closed-form analytic solution for a fixed-effect model in creating…

The use of sampling weights in deriving population estimates for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the effects of nonresponse and undercoverage on those estimates are described. The estimation of sampling variability from complex sample surveys is also reviewed, concentrating on the jackknife repeated replication…