Students are assessed by coursework and/or exams, all of which are marked by assessors (markers). Student and marker performances are then subject to end-of-session board of examiner handling and analysis. This occurs annually and is the basis for evaluating students but also the wider learning and teaching efficiency of an academic institution.…

Motivation impacts student academic performance. A performance task to directly assess writing motivation in young children is needed. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the validity of the Writing Challenge Task (WCT), a task-oriented assessment created to measure writing motivation with 106 kindergarten students in the rural…

Was the approach proposed for calculating exam grades in summer 2020 fair? Were the grades eventually awarded (after policy changes) fair? What is a fair arrangement for 2021? These questions have been at the heart of debate in the UK in the light of COVID-19. After schools were closed in the spring of 2020 and the decision was made not to proceed…

Panahi and Mohebbi review James Dean Brown's 50-years of research in language testing, curriculum development and research statistics with reference to an impressionistic framework for analysis containing two components with their subcomponents: Annotations (i.e., briefing and implications) and main concepts and themes (i.e., testing and teaching…

Standardised educational assessments are now widespread, yet their development has given comparatively more consideration to what to assess than how to optimally assess students' competencies. Existing evidence from behavioural studies with children and neuroscience studies with adults suggest that the method of assessment may affect neural…

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has released a report, "Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments," ostensibly an evaluative comparison of four testing programs, the Common Core derived SBAC and PARCC, ACT's Aspire, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' MCAS. Of course, anyone familiar with Fordham's past work…

This document includes two technical appendices that accompany the main report, "English Learner Trajectories and Reclassification." The two appendices include: (1) Methodology; and (2) Supporting Tables and Figures. [For the full report, see ED603764.]

Two hundred and two (n = 202) sixth-grade students in social studies were administered a weekly vocabulary-matching curriculum-based measure (CBM) for 35 weeks. Students were also administered the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI), along with the annual state high-stakes test in Communication Arts. CBM scores were analyzed with respect to…

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,…

Purpose: This AERI-NEPC eBrief, the fourth in a series titled "Understanding validity issues around the world", looks closely at issues surrounding the validity of test-based actions in educational accountability and school improvement contexts. The specific discussions here focus testing issues in the US. However, the general principles…

In this testimony, the author first describes her qualifications, as well as the lack of relevant qualifications in Common Core's standards writers and in most of the members of Common Core's Validation Committee, on which she served in 2009-2010. The author then details some of the many problems in the 2011 Massachusetts ELA standards, written by…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) measure of early numeracy for kindergarten through third grade students. Our CBM measures were developed to reflect broad and theoretically derived categories of mathematical thinking: quick retrieval, written computation, and number sense. The mastery of these…

Houston's experience with the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (R) (EVAAS) raises questions that other districts should consider before buying the software and using it for high-stakes decisions. Researchers found that teachers in Houston, all of whom were under the EVAAS gun, but who taught relatively more racial minority students,…

For decades, standardized reading comprehension tests have consisted of a series of passages and associated multiple-choice questions. Although widely used in and out of the classroom, there continues to be considerable disagreement regarding how or whether such tests have net value in the service of advancing educational progress in reading. This…

Relational reasoning is the foundational cognitive ability to discern meaningful patterns within an informational stream, but its reliable and valid measurement remains problematic. In this investigation, the measurement of relational reasoning unfolded in three stages. Stage 1 entailed the establishment of a research-based conceptualization of…