This paper investigates differences in students having various scores when designing controlled experiments in two types of scientific inquiry tasks (a fair test and an exhaustive test). We measure temporal features of preparation time and execution time, which reflect respectively the process of question understanding and answer planning and that…

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in subjects such as civics, geography, mathematics, reading, U.S. history, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. NAEP is a congressionally…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

Interrupted time-series (ITS) are often used to assess the causal effect of a planned or even unplanned shock introduced into an on-going process. The pre-intervention slope is supposed to index the causal counterfactual, and deviations from it in mean, slope or variance are used to indicate an effect. However, a secure causal inference is only…

To ensure reliable, accurate, and timely data, which are necessary to monitor the progress of education in the United States, Congress has mandated that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) produce an annual report, "The Condition of Education." This year's report presents 59 indicators of important developments and trends…