Growth-to-standard models evaluate student growth against the growth needed to reach a future standard or target of interest, such as proficiency. A common growth-to-standard model involves comparing the popular Student Growth Percentile (SGP) to Adequate Growth Percentiles (AGPs). AGPs follow from an involved process based on fitting a series of…

Practical nurses can provide quality, cost-effective care in an ever-changing health care setting which is faced with a shortage of nurses. A community college system in the southeastern area of the United States began using the Test of Essential Academic Skills (TEAS) V as part of admission criteria for nursing programs. While Assessment…

Although educators frequently use assessment to identify who needs supplemental instruction and if that instruction is working, there is a lack of research investigating assessment that informs what instruction students need. The purpose of the current study was to determine if a brief (approximately 20 min) task that reflects a common middle…

High school graduation is "not yet a reliable indicator of college readiness", (Gaertner & McClarty, 2015, p2). As such, researchers are investigating the use of non-cognitive factors as predictors of college and career readiness (CCR). The College and Career Readiness English Language Arts (ELA) Scale was designed to measure…

As a form of aptitude testing for interpreting, recall across languages has long been considered as a valid means of assessing candidates' linguistic, cognitive and communicative abilities. However, most of the existing research on this topic is only derived from the consensus among or the professional experience of interpreting researchers,…

In the psychology and educational science programs at Ghent University, only 36.1% of the new incoming students in 2011 and 2012 passed all exams. Despite availability of information, many students underestimate the scientific character of social science programs. Statistics courses are a major obstacle in this matter. Not all enrolling students…

Screening and monitoring student reading progress can be costly and time consuming. Assessment embedded within the context of online instructional programs can capture ongoing student performance data while limiting testing time outside of instruction. This paper presents two studies that examined the validity of using performance measures from a…

We use longitudinal data from Washington State to provide estimates of the extent to which performance on the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, is predictive of the likelihood of employment in the teacher workforce and value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. While edTPA scores are highly…

Open book assessment is not a new idea, but it does not seem to have gained ground in higher education. In particular, not much literature is available on open book examinations in mathematics and statistics in higher education. The objective of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of open book assessments in a first-year business…

Academic researchers have often touted the growing importance of "soft skills" for modern day business leaders, especially leadership and communication skills. Despite this growing interest and attention, relatively little work has been done to develop and validate tools to assess soft skills. Forty graduate students from nine MBA…

This study involves the development of a three-tier diagnostic test to measure high school students' understanding of states of matter concepts. The States of Matter Diagnostic Test (SMDT) is a 19-item three-tier diagnostic test consisting of three-tier items for assessing students' understanding of states of matter concepts. The SMDT was…

This paper reports on two studies that evaluated the statistical validity of the Classroom Learning and Development Questionnaire as a universal screening and early identification observation instrument within the North American context. The Classroom Learning and De-development Questionnaire was first proposed and tested in Hong Kong in the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the four sources of self-efficacy in music performance and examine responses from the Music Performance Self-Efficacy Scale (MPSES). Participants (N = 290) were middle and high school music students from 10 schools in two regions of the United States. Questions included the following: (1) How much…

Reading instruction for students with MoID is typically limited to sight-word instruction. We developed a 2-part, phonetic instructional sequence based upon Direct Instruction teaching methodology to teach students with MoID word-analysis skills that generalize to untaught words encountered in their environment. Elementary and middle-school…

Data from the ALEKS-based placement program at the University of Illinois is presented visually in several ways. The placement exam (an ALEKS assessment) contains precise item-specific information and the data show many interesting properties of the student populations of the placement courses, which include Precalculus, Calculus, and Business…