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…

Statewide testing with college admissions exams dates to 2001, when Colorado and Illinois introduced the practice. Such testing expanded in subsequent years, and beginning in 2017--2018, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allowed states to use a college admissions exam to meet accountability requirements for high schools. Some see this option…

Math in Common® (MiC) is a five-year initiative that supports a formal network of 10 California school districts as they implement the Common Core State Standards in mathematics (CCSS-M) across grades K-8. As the MiC initiative moves into its second year, one of the central activities that each of the districts is undergoing to support CCSS…

High stakes testing is popularly examined in educational research, but contemporary analyses tend to reflect a qualitative or quantitative research design (e.g., Au, 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2006; Gamble, 2010). Exhaustive debate over the relative success or failure of high stakes testing is often framed between competing visions of…

School librarians and other specialists should take note of the new wave of computer-based assessments required by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), testing that is only now beginning to get off the ground. The new testing necessitates that districts possess the right hardware, install the requisite software, and, in some cases, create…

This report identifies the states with current or pending state-level end-of-course assessment (EOC) programs, the subjects in which EOCs are administered in the states, and the EOCs (if any) students must pass to graduate from high school. Twenty-two states currently administer one or more EOCs to all students in an EOC course. This number will…

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to discover the influence of a student achievement program implemented at one large urban high school that employed extrinsic motivation to promote student achievement on state assessments. Using organismic integration theory as the theoretical framework, 19 randomly selected students participated…

This is the thirteenth annual report by the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) that analyzes public reporting practices of assessment data for students with disabilities in K-12 schools in the United States. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) required states to disaggregate performance data at the state and district…

Unparalleled demands on state assessment programs and conditions associated with the availability of federal monies, particularly the $350 million portion of the $4 billion Race to the Top funds set aside for assessment, have led to a renewed interest in the establishment of state consortia for the development and administration of assessment…

There has been little data collected on how much testing actually goes on in America's schools and how the results are used. So in the Spring of 2014, the Council staff developed and launched a survey of assessment practices. This report presents the findings from that survey and subsequent Council analysis and review of the data. It also offers…

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 technical report provides an overview of the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA), including a description of the purpose of the NYSAA, the processes utilized to develop and implement the NYSAA program, and Stakeholder involvement in those processes. The purpose of this report is to document the technical aspects of the 2013-14 NYSAA.…

This edited volume covers the range of critical trends in the use of computers and other devices for classroom teaching, online learning, professional development, school improvement, and student assessment. "Spotlight on Technology in Education" draws on expert sources including teacher-leaders, librarians, researchers, and trainers who…

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…

This article features FAST-R, or Formative Assessments of Student Thinking in Reading, a new assessment tool that measures critical-reading skills. FAST-R was developed by the the nonprofit Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE), a local education foundation, to provide teachers with information about what students are thinking when they try to find…