High-quality assessments are crucial to many aspects of the educational process. They can help policymakers monitor long-term educational trends, assist state educational agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) in allocating resources and professional development opportunities, provide insights to teachers about how well students…

Like instruments used in afterschool programs to assess children's social and emotional growth or to evaluate staff members' performance, instruments used to evaluate program quality should be free from bias. Practitioners and researchers alike want to know that assessment instruments, whatever their type or intent, treat all people fairly and do…

This chapter is a research summary of the author's doctoral dissertation completed in May, 2015, which investigates the way Standardized Assessment (SA) is used in state educational accountability structures. This quasi-experimental quantitative study found that SA scores trend towards consistency over time, and that there is additional variance,…

A response is made to a paper that urges the use of the Rasch model for educational assessment. This paper argues that the model is inadequate and that claims for its efficacy are exaggerated and technically weak.

In recent guidelines for fair educational testing it is advised to check the validity of individual test scores through the use of person-fit statistics. For practitioners it is unclear on the basis of the existing literature which statistic to use. An overview of relatively simple existing nonparametric approaches to identify atypical response…

Background/Context: The evolution of validity understandings from mid-century to now has emphasized that test validity depends on test purpose--adding consequence considerations to issues of interpretation and evidentiary warrants. Purpose: To consider the tensions created by multiple purposes for assessment and sketch briefly how we got to where…

The main problem of the educational evaluation validity is that it just copies the conceptual framework system of validity from educational measurement to its own conceptual system. The validity conceptual system that fits the need of theory and practice of educational evaluation has not been established yet. According to the inherent attributive…

Two quantitative measures of school performance are currently used, the average points score (APS) at Key Stage 2 and value-added (VA), which measures the rate of academic improvement between Key Stage 1 and 2. These figures are used by parents and the Office for Standards in Education to make judgements and comparisons. However, simple…

The No Child Left Behind Act mandated the development of statewide alternate assessments to measure the academic achievement of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. The valid assessment of all test takers is critical due to its high-stakes nature and the use of its results to inform instruction. Given the heterogeneity of the…

Since their inception, charter schools have been a lighting rod for controversy, with much of the debate revolving around their effectiveness in improving student achievement. Previous research has shown mixed results for student achievement; this could be the consequence of different policy environments or varying methodological approaches with…

Assessment of lexical/semantic knowledge is performed with a variety of tests varying in response requirements. The present study exemplifies the application of modern statistical approaches in the adaptation and assessment of the psychometric properties of the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Revised" (PPVT-R) Greek. Confirmatory…

The rank-ordering method for standard maintaining was designed for the purpose of mapping a known cut-score (e.g. a grade boundary mark) on one test to an equivalent point on the test score scale of another test, using holistic expert judgements about the quality of exemplars of examinees' work (scripts). It is a novel application of an old…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

Placement exams are high-stakes assessments that determine many students' college trajectories. More than half of entering students at community colleges are placed into developmental education in at least one subject, based primarily on scores from these assessments, yet recent research fails to find evidence that placement into remediation…

This article develops a model for longitudinal student achievement data designed to estimate heterogeneity in teacher effects across students of different achievement levels. The model specifies interactions between teacher effects and students' predicted scores on a test, estimating both average effects of individual teachers and interaction…