This study is an evaluation of the psychometric issues associated with estimating objective level scores, often referred to as "subscores." The article begins by introducing the concepts of reliability and validity for subscores from statewide achievement tests. These issues are discussed with reference to popular scaling techniques, classical…

The U.S. Department of Education has not yet published an official guidance document for using NAEP achievement level scores to confirm state testing results. A review of the literature, however, identified four principles that inform the valid use of NAEP scores in a confirming analysis. The principles address the appropriate NAEP statistics to…

The state of Nebraska has adopted a unique approach to statewide reporting that requires school districts to develop district-level assessments of the state student content standards or district standards comparable in quality and to report the results to the state and public. This system allows districts to base their assessments on what they are…

Reanalyzed data evaluated by A. Amrein and D. Berliner, using a comparison group of states that did not attach consequences to their statewide tests. States that did attach consequences outperformed states that did not, showing meaningful carryover from attaching consequences to statewide testing. (SLD)

Reanalysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress continues to support the position that high-stakes tests do not do much to improve academic achievement. Data indicate that the extent to which states with high-stakes tests outperform those without remains indeterminable. (SLD)

This report examines the overlap between student test results on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). The two tests were compared and contrasted in terms of content and measurement philosophy, and analyses studied the statistical relationship between the ITBS and the WASL. The ITBS assesses…

This study, one of a series designed to answer practical questions about performance based assessment, examined the comparability of school scores on short, nonparallel test forms. The data were obtained from mathematics tests with both multiple choice (MC) and performance assessment (PA) items. The tests were administered in a statewide testing…

Maryland participated in the State National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1996 and 1998 when samples of approximately 2,500 fourth and eighth graders in 100 schools participated in the testing sessions for mathematics (1996) and reading (1998). This report is an initial attempt to return information to Maryland about the relations…

Discusses issues associated with the use of holistic and analytic scoring methods in large-scale student assessments. Reviews the education literature and describes the recent Saskatchewan study comparing the results of the two scoring approaches applied to an achievement test taken by about 1,600 third graders. (SLD)

Created a developmental scale for the North Carolina End-of-Grade Mathematics Tests using a subset of identical test forms administered to adjacent grade levels with Thurstone scaling and Item Response Theory methods. Discusses differences in patterns produced. (Author/SLD)

In 1980, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) revised the instruments used to assess basic skills attainment in mathematics and reading of all students in grades 4, 7, and 10. The research summarized in this paper examined the factor structures of the 1979 and 1980 versions of the Grade 10 MEAP mathematics test. These two versions…

This brief discusses ways to measure and report school quality. At present, the differences in state accountability systems make comparisons of schools and school systems very difficult. The most common approach to reporting school status is in the context of current status, an approach in which the school mean or median score for students in the…

Because districts in Nebraska are not measured on common instruments, comparisons are difficult. This study examined a district evaluation strategy that classifies districts into school performance ratings (SPR) based on a combination of three factors. Student performance and non-cognitive indicator data for three grade levels and two content…

Proposed an accountably model that addresses the challenges of allowing school districts to choose the specific strategies they use to measure student performance and evaluated this model using data from multiple sources for all school districts in Florida. Findings identify three strategies that would be useful for this type of accountability…

This study considered two questions about the use of national and state assessment databases: (1) Do state and national assessments provide the same information on the performance of an educational system? and (2) What are the factors that might affect the discrepancies between national and state assessment results? Kentucky and Maine were chosen…