The North Carolina End-of-Grade Testing Program is based on the assessment of higher-level skills, the thinking and problem-solving strategies that enable people to access, sort, and digest information. The end-of-grade tests, which are aligned with the state's "Standard Course of Study," were designed to be administered at the end of…

Matches between questions in the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System for 1995-96 (KIRIS96), the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, Fourth Edition (CTBS4), and the California Achievement Tests, Fifth Edition (CAT5) and the Kentucky Academic Expectations as they are defined in the Kentucky curriculum framework were studied. Each…

The North Carolina Testing Program is based on the assessment of higher level skills, the skills required to solve problems and make informed choices and decisions. This guide explains the end-of-course tests that are a component of the Testing Program and provides information to interpret them. The end-of-course tests for high school students are…

Performance based assessment refers to tasks that require students to construct responses or take actions to demonstrate specific knowledge or skills. Performance assessment tasks appear in a variety of formats, but they focus on higher order skills and are nonroutine, and sometimes loosely structured, in nature. A number of concerns have been…

Analyses of 10 raters' reasoning during think-aloud interviews provided evidence to support a model of the fundamental processes involved in rating standards-based, nonprescriptive portfolios. This process model provides a framework within which to conceptualize sound-rater reasoning and to identify reasoning that distorts the meaning of scores.…

The College Outcome Measures Program (COMP) and its role in an era when standardized testing is being questioned and authentic assessment is championed are discussed. Authentic assessment should not mean discarding measurement expertise and existing technology. It is an approach to measuring the quality and level of performance that uses real…

Student learning is the bottom line for nearly all efforts to establish a national test system. Major efforts in this area are summarized in this paper. The various efforts seem to move ahead independently, but some common ideas include: (1) creating a national assessment system rather than a single test; (2) developing more than multiple-choice…

The end-of-grade component of the North Carolina Testing Program was implemented in 1992-93 in response to state legislation. The end-of-grade tests emphasize higher-order thinking skills and the ability of students to solve real-life types of problems. These tests also reflect the higher standards set forth in national curriculum standards for…

In the 1992 mathematics assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), approximately one-third of the questions and about half of the student response time were devoted to questions asking students to construct their own responses. Regular constructed response items required a short answer with a problem solution, while…

This study demonstrates that the validity and usefulness of mathematics achievement tests can be improved by defining psychologically meaningful subscores that yield differential relations with student, teacher, and school variables. The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) 8th- and 10th-grade math tests were subjected to full…