Reading-to-write (RTW) tasks are becoming increasingly popular and have already been used in several high-stakes English proficiency exams, either replacing or complementing a prompt-based essay test. However, it is still not clear that what accounts for successful or unsuccessful performance on an integrated reading-writing task is owing to the…

Equating test forms is an essential activity in standardized testing, with increased importance with the accountability systems in existence through the mandate of Adequate Yearly Progress. It is through equating that scores from different test forms become comparable, which allows for the tracking of changes in the performance of students from…

The "PIRLS 2016 Assessment Framework, 2nd Edition" provides the foundation for the three international assessments planned as part of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016: PIRLS, PIRLS Literacy, and ePIRLS. PIRLS represents the…

Policy-makers are frequently interested in understanding how effective a particular intervention may be for a specific (and often broad) population. In many fields, particularly education and social welfare, the ideal form of these evaluations is a large-scale randomized experiment. Recent research has highlighted that sites in these large-scale…

The evolution of object-oriented programming languages includes update of their own versions, update of development environments, and reform of new languages upon old languages. In this paper, the evolution analysis of object-oriented programming languages is presented in term of the characters and development. The notion of adaptive teaching upon…

The research reported here suggests that raters, when involved in writing assessment, are more concerned with their own criteria to set a basis for their judgment rather than the standards provided by scale descriptors. This study sampled think aloud of eight raters who scored 15 essays in accord with Test of Written English (TWE) holistic scoring…

AMLE's hot new release provides teachers with more than 60 ways to authentically assess student learning. Whether it's researching and describing Lewis and Clark's discoveries of the western frontier in a traditional journal format or writing blog entries from the perspective of a cell, students will learn to demonstrate and assess their own…

To provide an opportunity for teachers to better understand the automated scoring process used by the state of West Virginia on our annual West Virginia Educational Standards Test 2 (WESTEST 2) Online Writing Assessment, the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) Office of Assessment and Accountability and the Office of Research conduct an…

We describe a Mastery Rubric for the design and evaluation of an institutional curriculum in the responsible conduct of research (RCR), motivated by new federal (US) research funding requirements for documenting this training over investigators' careers. A Mastery Rubric outlines the desired knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) for a course or…

The authors review the "Shipley-2 Manual," a revised and restandardized version of the Shipley Institute of Living Scale, which is a brief yet robust measure of cognitive functioning and impairment. Like the previous version, the Shipley-2 assesses crystallized ability, which is gained through education and experience, and fluid…

Minimum passing scores for the Gearing Up for Safety: Production Agriculture Safety Training for Youth curriculum (Gearing Up for Safety) were set in 2006 with widely used and established procedures by efforts of subject matter experts (French, Breidenbach et al., 2007; French, Field, and Tormoehlen, 2006, 2007). While providing a research-based…

This article examines assessment of "intangible" concepts in dance education such as creativity, risk, originality, or artistic thinking. Through the development of assessment workshops for arts educators, conducted from 2009 through 2011 across the state of Illinois and supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the authors developed a…

In teaching young dancers ballet, the utilization of effective assessments in partnership with supportive and creative teaching strategies can transform not only the learning experience, but the dancer as well. In this article, the author shares a "growth grade rubric" that specifically addresses three areas in ballet training: (1) skills and…

Mastering content vocabulary is critical to the success of students with high-incidence disabilities in the general education curriculum. General education classrooms often do not offer the opportunities necessary for these students to master important vocabulary. Teachers often look to technology to help. Several studies have indicated that…

This inquiry utilizes a sheltered instruction approach to lesson planning with the intention of improving teacher candidates' instruction to English Language Learners (ELLs). In this study a web-based questionnaire and a sheltered instruction lesson plan template were used to facilitate opportunities for teacher candidates to reflect on and…