Smarter Balanced is committed to providing accessibility resources and supporting formative assessment processes that help educators better serve the needs of diverse students, including students who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or blind or visually impaired. This document describes how Smarter Balanced designs accessible tests and supports…

Now in a revised and updated fourth edition, this accessible text has given over 100,000 preservice and inservice teachers vital tools for systematic reading assessment in grades K-8. The book explains how to use both formal and informal assessments to evaluate students' strengths and needs in all components of reading. Effective, engaging methods…

Assessing English learners (ELs) in US schools is challenging because many widely used assessments have not been designed with ELs in mind. Yet if teachers are sensitive to how ELs may perform differently from native speakers on such assessments, these assessments reveal useful information about ELs' language and literacy skills. This mixed-method…

This technical assistance paper provides policy and guidance to individuals with test administration responsibilities in adult education programs. The Florida assessment policies and guidelines presented in this paper are appropriate for state and federal reporting. Therefore, guidance and procedures regarding the selection and use of appropriate…

This article used several data sets from a large-scale state testing program to examine the feasibility of combining general and modified assessment items in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) for different groups of students. Results suggested that several of the assumptions made when employing this type of mixed-item CAT may not be met for…

In the context of higher education, a competence may be understood as the combination of skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and abilities that underpin effective and/or superior performance in a professional area. The aim of the work reported here was to design a set of procedures to assess a transferable competence, i.e., problem solving, that…

The subject of the research is to build methodologies to evaluate the student knowledge by testing. The author points to the importance of feedback about the mastering level in the learning process. Testing is considered as a tool. The object of the study is to create the test system models for defence practice problems. Special attention is paid…

Online higher education institutions are presented with the concern of how to obtain valid results when administering student learning outcomes (SLO) assessments remotely. Traditionally, there has been a great reliance on unproctored Internet test administration (UIT) due to increased flexibility and reduced costs; however, a number of validity…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Systems (SBAC) started in the 2014-2015 academic year and has been regarded by many in the field as a radical effort to improve the American English Language Art (ELA) educational standards. These two consortia, being aligned with Common…

The definition of what it means to take a test online continues to evolve with the inclusion of a broader range of item types and a wide array of devices used by students to access test content. To assure the validity and reliability of test scores for all students, device comparability research should be conducted to evaluate the impact of…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a group of states working together to develop a set of assessments that measure whether students are on track to be successful in college and their careers. These high-quality, computer-based K-12 assessments in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA/L)…

Twenty-first-century healthcare is a complex and demanding arena. Today's hospital environment is more complex than in previous years while patients move through the system at a much faster pace. Newly graduated nurses are challenged in their first year with the healthcare needs of complex patients. Nurse educators and nurse leaders differ in…

This study investigated U.S. undergraduates' perceptions of non-native speakers' (NNS) speech which had received 100% proficiency scores on the TOEFL iBT test. Fifty-five U.S. undergraduates rated 20 speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability. The speech samples were also analyzed for acoustic fluency. Descriptively,…

With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to…

Objectives: In the USA, 18% of school-aged young people are classified as obese, and rural populations appear to be particularly at risk. Achieving high levels of fitness reduces the risk of obesity and underlying health conditions. To better understand youth obesity trends and fitness levels, annual fitness testing ([FT], that is, surveillance)…