Conceptualizations of developmental trends are driven by the particular method used to analyze the period of change of interest. Various techniques exist to analyze developmental data, including individual growth curve analysis in observed and latent frameworks, cross-lagged regression to assess interrelations among variables, and multilevel…

This study was conducted to systematically track and benchmark upper primary school students' ESL reading comprehension ability and subsequently generate data at the micro and macro levels according to individual achievement, school location, gender and ethnicity at the school, district, state and national levels. The main intention of this…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

The need to address social and economic changes has focused greater attention on our public education system and the need to better equip students with the skills needed for a global society. This quantitative study was grounded in the principles of the constructivist learning theory. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the added…

This study sought to investigate the relationship between middle school principals' instructional leadership behaviors and student achievement. In particular, this study investigated the specific principal leadership behaviors of middle level principals that promote student achievement in school. A secondary variable for consideration was student…

Xu and von Davier (2006) demonstrated the feasibility of using the general diagnostic model (GDM) to analyze National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency data. Their work showed that the GDM analysis not only led to conclusions for gender and race groups similar to those published in the NAEP Report Card, but also allowed…

The purpose of this investigation was to study four questions concerning reading achievement and related variables in the largest cities of Connecticut. The four questions were: (1) Has there been a change in average fourth-grade achievement in Title I schools since 1965-1966?; (2) Has the difference between the mean reading achievement of…

More than a dozen statistical models have been developed for the purpose of cognitive diagnosis. These models are supposed to extract a much finer level of information from item responses than traditional unidimensional item response models. In this paper, a general diagnostic model (GDM) was used to analyze a set of simulated sparse data and real…

In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) proposed to implement a new, complex design for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The major features of this design are described in "A New Design for a New Era" (Messick, Beaton, and Lord, 1983). The purpose of this document is to describe the actual implementation of…

This document is the users' guide for Version 3.1 of the Public-Use data tapes compiled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1983-84. The Public-Use tapes are produced to allow outside researchers access to the NAEP data. The tapes accompanying this guide contain data assessing student achievement in reading and writing at…

The development and refinement of the measures of student achievement in reading and mathematics for the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study are described. The concept of reactivity to instruction is introduced: the tests used to evaluate instructional processes must be sensitive indicators of classroom learning overtime. Data collection activities…

This document is the users' guide for Version 1.0 of the Public-Use data tapes compiled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1985-86. The Public-Use tapes are produced to allow outside researchers access to the NAEP data. The tapes accompanying this guide, one for grade 3/age 9, one for grade 7/age 13, and one for grade…

Two methods of reading instruction (homogeneous grouping and graded classes) are compared for 165 students in 8 rural North Dakota schools by raw gain scores, residual gain scores, and the analysis of covariance. (CK)