Because of the Goals 200 Quality Improvement program of the federal government, Head Start agencies are being held more accountable for their employees and the overall operation of their program. To evaluate these more effectively, agencies need an effective employee evaluation instrument. Strategies were implemented in an agency that provides…

The amount of variability contributed to large-scale performance assessment scores by raters is a constant concern for those who wish to use results from these assessments for educational decisions. This study approaches the problem by examining the behaviors of essay scorers who demonstrate different levels of proficiency with a holistic scoring…

This book is designed to help teachers use journals to integrate authentic assessment with the instruction of mathematics. It provides a structure to encourage students to write regularly in mathematics. The book is designed to help teachers develop their own assessment questions and activities for additional mathematical explorations. For each…

This book is a collection of articles on assessment in mathematics selected from issues of three journals: "The Arithmetic Teacher" (later published as "Teaching Children Mathematics"), "The Mathematics Teacher," and "Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School". Articles provide background, rationale, or a…

This paper explains the multifacet technology for analyzing performance examinations and the fair average method of setting criterion standards. The multidimensional nature of performance examinations requires that multiple and often different facets elements of a candidate's examination form be accounted for in the analysis. After this is…

A study examined the effects of statewide performance-based assessment (the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP)) on literacy instruction, administrative support provided to facilitate instructional change, and student and teacher affect in response to change in elementary classrooms. Of the schools in Maryland identified by…

In foreign language testing, as in all testing, validity is the primary criterion for test quality. However plausible the concept of validity, in practice it is not always easy to arrive at congruence between the test situation and the real-life situation the learner is expected to master. Some language educators make authenticity a major…

Not infrequently, investigators assume that reliability for groups is greater than reliability for persons, or that the error variance for groups is less than that for persons. Using generalizability theory, it is shown that this "conventional wisdom" is not necessarily true. Examples are provided from the course-evaluation and the…

The number of women in the workforce has increased dramatically. However, the number of high school females enrolled in physical science classes remains low. To aid in ensuring that females succeed in the physical sciences, a symposium was held. This document highlights the events of the aforementioned symposium. The "Girls and the Physical…

Researchers and education leaders may seek to identify high-performing schools for at least three purposes. The first is to study how the practices in high-performing schools differ from those in average- or low-performing schools, in the hope that some of these practices will prove useful in improving other schools. The second is to use the…

Imagine conducting a classroom observation and having a professional-looking observation report completed before you ever leave the room. This CD is the busy school administrator's best friend, bringing the tasks of completing classroom observation reports and performance evaluation reports into the 21st century. This innovative CD-ROM helps make…

The purpose of this briefing paper is to review common approaches to performance evaluation in accountability systems, in order to recommend a workable approach for California Community colleges, as the system seeks to meet the requirements of district-level accountability required by AB 1417. The recommendations within this paper capture commonly…

This paper first provides a summary and overview of what is already known and what is needed to learn about item types for future assessments by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In essence, the question addressed is whether constructed response items provide more information about what students are capable of doing than that…

The GenScope Assessment Project is studying assessment in the context of a month-long computer-supported learning environment for introductory genetics. Across three annual iterations with multiple teachers, project researchers manipulated the materials, incentives, and contexts in which students were invited to use formative feedback on…

The project's focus was to learn more about the ways to best assess and support the development of numeracy in the early grades. Project goals include involving teachers and researchers in: (1) the creation and use of performance-based tasks most appropriate for assessing numeracy in young learners; (2) the development and refinement of…