This article proposes that sampling design effects have potentially huge unrecognized impacts on the results reported by large-scale district and state assessments in the United States. When design effects are unrecognized and unaccounted for they lead to underestimating the sampling error in item and test statistics. Underestimating the sampling…

States participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress State Assessment program (state NAEP) are required to sample at least 2,500 students from at least 100 schools per subject assessed. In this ideal situation, 25 students are assessed for a subject in each school selected for that subject. Two problems have arisen: some states…

This report describes the comprehensive evaluation study of the California State Preschool Program which involved elementary school children in educationally disadvantaged areas throughout California. Various test scores of approximately 6000 children in kindergarten, first, and second grade who had previously participated for at least a year in…

This paper discusses a number of interventions that are aimed at increasing educational opportunities of homeless students in the United States. Only a few of these programs have been locally evaluated, and the evaluation process is particularly challenging for local evaluators to undertake. At a state and national level, commitment to evaluation…

This report documents the design and data analysis procedures of the Trial State Assessment Program of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Today the NAEP is the only survey using advanced plausible values methodology that uses a multiple imputation procedure in a psychometric context. The 1990 Trial State Assessment collected…

Recent investigations of the extent to which students with disabilities are allowed to participate in major national data collections used in measurement-driven education reform suggest that 40 to 50 percent of students with disabilities are typically excluded from major assessments, although they are included to a greater degree in assessments…

The New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program (PreK) evaluation studied successive waves of children while they were in PreK, and as they progressed through the third grade. For each wave, two control groups were obtained: (1) A waiting-list control group, children in districts offering PreK programs who were identified as eligible for…

This report of the results of the 1974-75 Florida National Assessment Replication in reading and mathematics at the 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old age levels consists of several major parts: an overview of the assessment design and methodology, comparisons of performance levels for groups of Florida students within each age level, comparisons of…