Assessing the achievement of students in elementary and secondary schools and the nation's educational progress is fundamental to informing education policy approaches. Congressional interest in this area includes and extends beyond the annual assessments administered by states to comply with the educational accountability requirements of Title…

Scholastic tests regard cognitive abilities to be domain-specific competences. However, high correlations between competences indicate either high task similarity or a dependence on common factors. The present rating study examined the validity of 12 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Third or Trends in International…

This tutorial addresses possible sources of confusion in interpreting trait scores from the bifactor model. The bifactor model may be used when subscores are desired, either for formative feedback on an achievement test or for theoretically different constructs on a psychological test. The bifactor model is often chosen because it requires fewer…

Variation in test performance among examinees from different regions or national jurisdictions is often partially attributed to differences in the degree of content correspondence between local school or training program curricula, and the test of interest. This posited relationship between test-curriculum correspondence, or "alignment,"…

In this article we provide a critique of the interpretation and utilization of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results by the National Education Authorities in Turkey. First, we define and explain what OECD's PISA is. Second, we make an overview of the media coverage in Turkey of the PISA 2003 and 2006 results. Third, we…

Discusses results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which examined the use of educational technology. Topics include validity and interpretation of results; and what needs to change about how technology is used in education, including adding technology…

The six chapters of this theme issue focus on equivalence and comparability issues in international assessment, examining the impact of these issues on the validity of international assessments and the interpretation of results, including those of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. (SLD)

Because education in the United States is largely determined at the state and local levels, there has been considerable interest in how the performance of students in individual states compares with each other, with the United States as a whole, and with other nations. The comparison of state performance with other states and the nation as a whole…