Recent years have produced a surge in interest in improving state assessment programs. Many states are designing new assessments. Much of this innovation is aimed at addressing longstanding areas of unhappiness with typical domain-sampled, end-of-year state assessments: States want to streamline assessment activities, enhance the instructional…

Although the number of countries conducting large-scale assessments has increased significantly over the past two decades, this has not necessarily led to the effective use of learning assessment data in policy-making and planning. To better understand the reasons for this, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)…

Large-scale learning assessments can be used to generate performance and contextual data on student learning outcomes. They can be national, regional, or international; school based or household based. The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has conducted a qualitative study to explore both how and why learning…

The purpose of this study was to examine African American and Latino student perceptions on test-centered curricular protocols in the urban high school context. Data collection occurred through observations, classroom dialogue initiated by the researchers, and individual student interviews throughout an academic semester. Findings suggest that…

The OECD and its U.S. administrator, McGraw-Hill Education CTB, have recently concluded the first cycle of the OECD-Test for Schools in the U.S. This test is being marketed to local schools and is designed to compare 15-year-olds from individual participating schools against peers nationally and internationally using the OECD's PISA test as its…

This article is a commentary on Australia's involvement in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. It provides a rationale for Australia's participation in the PISA programme, the influences of PISA involvement on education policies and practices, and considerations and implications for school leaders and education…

With increased emphasis on accountability, the use of low-stakes test data to make high-stakes decisions about program effectiveness is on the rise. In order to make valid inferences about what students know and can do, it is crucial to understand the consequences of low and high stakes in testing contexts. As a result, with a sample comprised of…

This report examines the differences in impact estimates and standard errors that arise when these are derived using state achievement tests only (as pre-tests and post-tests), study-administered tests only, or some combination of state- and study-administered tests. State tests may yield different evaluation results relative to a test that is…

This study examines the practical implications of using state tests to measure student achievement in impact evaluations that span multiple states and grades. In particular, the study examines the sensitivity of impact findings to (1) the type of assessment used to measured achievement (state tests or an external assessment administered by the…

This dissertation examined perceptions of superintendents, principals and teachers about South Carolina's Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test or the Palmetto Assessment of State Standards testing program. A systemic sample of 729 superintendents, principals, and teachers were selected to participate in the study. A survey was emailed to the…

Securing data on students' academic achievement is typically one of the most important and costly aspects of conducting education experiments. As state assessment programs have become practically universal and more uniform in terms of grades and subjects tested, the relative appeal of using state tests as a source of study outcome measures has…

The discussion here covers five articles that are linked in the sense that they all treat population invariance. This discussion of population invariance is a somewhat broader treatment of the subject than simply a discussion of these five articles. In particular, occasional reference is made to publications other than those in this issue. The…

This article discusses the five studies included in this issue. Each article addressed the same topic, population invariance of equating. They all used data from major standardized testing programs, and they all used essentially the same statistics to evaluate their results, namely, the root mean square difference and root expected mean square…

Two models are presented in this article for estimating the proportion of students who would pass all of three or more content area tests given that none have actually been tested in more than two of the content areas. The first model allows one to estimate the proportion of students who would pass all of three or more content area tests from the…

ACT maintains that monitoring academic strengths and weaknesses through the effective use of results from standardized tests can promote learning and intellectual growth. When schools use achievement test scores to guide curriculum choices and to provide feedback to students, opportunities for learning increase. The ACT Educational Planning and…