The Assessment of Campus Climate to Enhance Student Success survey (ACCESS) is a set of four questionnaires designed to elicit feedback from five campus constituencies including faculty, administration, staff, students with disabilities, and students without disabilities "to use in planning and garnering support for meaningful activities and…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

We estimated the invariance of educational achievement (EA) and learning attitudes (LA) measures across nations. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to estimate the invariance of educational achievement and learning attitudes across 55 nations (Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2006 data, N = 354,203). The…

Teachers tasked with developing moral character in future physicians face an array of pedagogic challenges, among them identifying tools to measure progress in instilling the requisite skill set. One validated instrument for assessing moral judgment is the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2). Based on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, the test's main…

This paper, commissioned by [National Postsecondary Education Cooperative] NPEC--Sample Surveys, considers issues important to any effort in which the [National Center for Education Statistics] NCES chose to engage the higher education community in a deliberative process that explores the development of data on student learning through a…

Curriculum-based measurement of oral reading (CBM-R) is frequently used to set student goals and monitor student progress. This study examined the quality of growth estimates derived from CBM-R progress monitoring data. The authors used a linear mixed effects regression (LMER) model to simulate progress monitoring data for multiple levels of…

In an uncertain economy, reliable information about tomorrow's labor market can be a valuable tool in career planning. Understanding the future workforce helps an individual prepare for his/her place in it. When choosing among careers--or assisting others who are making such choices--it helps to know a few basics: the types and number of jobs…

The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides an opportunity to reconsider what factors school performance-reporting systems should include. Critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have pointed to the narrowing effects of the law's focus on mathematics and reading achievement, and they have called for efforts…

A computer adaptive test (CAT) is a delivery methodology that serves the larger goals of the assessment system in which it is embedded. A thorough analysis of the assessment system for which a CAT is being designed is critical to ensure that the delivery platform is appropriate and addresses all relevant complexities. As such, a CAT engine must be…

Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

The paper describes a study conducted to explicate the multiple theories underlying Chile's national teacher evaluation program. These theories will serve as the basis for evaluating the intended consequences of this evaluation system, while not losing sight of emerging unintended consequences. We first analyzed legal and policy documents and then…

Many postsecondary institutions currently administer standardized tests of general college outcomes; more than a quarter of Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) member institutions do so. Using standardized tests for accountability purposes has been contentious mainly because these tests do not measure every important…

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this…

Development of adaptive tests used in K-12 settings requires the creation of stable measurement scales to measure the growth of individual students from one grade to the next, and to measure change in groups from one year to the next. Accountability systems like No Child Left Behind require stable measurement scales so that accountability has…

This article describes the Voluntary Support for Education (VSE) Survey, an instrument created by the Council for Aid to Education. Our objective is to explain VSE's potential value as a tool to inform both institutional and academic research regarding fund-raising activities at community colleges. Of particular interest is how the data available…