The Lau Remedies, federal recommendations to help school districts comply with the law in providing education for non-English-speaking children, raised questions of language assessment and resulted in a variety of language tests. Four years later, an examination of 46 currently available language tests, in the context of commonly accepted notions…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is now accepted as the nation's report card, but getting there took over 30 years and a convoluted process beset by technical and political issues. After a summary of the history of the NAEP and its successful use as a monitoring instrument, the ramifications of the use of the NAEP as an…

Starting in the late 1980s, two teams of researchers, well known for their criticism of standardized tests on equity and validity grounds, began attacking standardized testing on efficiency grounds as well, using cost-benefit analysis to do it. Their analyses are reviewed, and their conclusions discussed. The first team, Lorrie A. Shepard, Amelia…

The purpose of this paper, which is drawn from a larger analytic history of the National Teacher Evaluation (NTE) program, is to investigate issues of validity within the context of the program's 50-year history. Three major findings emerge from historical considerations relating to: (1) the continuity of test content and justification over the…