This book contains a collection of formal and informal reading assessments for use with students in Grades K-8. These assessments assist the teacher in targeting areas of strength and weakness, in monitoring student reading development, and in planning appropriate instruction. The book's assessments (some in both English and Spanish) range from…

The Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), offers the most comprehensive picture available of the education system in the United States. The aim of this study is to show the potential value of a linkage between SASS and data on student academic achievement. To achieve this aim, the…

This document includes the left-hand column ("What All Students Should Know") and the center column ("What All Students Should Be Able To Do") from "Missouri's Framework for Curriculum Development in Communication Arts K-12." Next to these two columns has been added a column which includes assessment notes for those…

Beginning in Spring 1998, Virginia students participated in the Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments designed to test student knowledge of the content and skills specified in the state's standards. This document contains questions that approximately 80,000 students in grade 5 were required to answer as part of the SOL assessments. These…

Score equity assessment was used to evaluate linkings of new SAT® to the current SAT Reasoning Test™. Population invariance across gender groups was studied on the linkage of a new SAT critical reading prototype to a current SAT verbal section, and on the linkage of a new SAT math prototype to a current SAT math section. The results indicated that…

The study of curriculum-based measurement (CBM), involving 57 adults in a basic literacy program, found that narrative rather than expository passages exhibited higher reliability. Level of difficulty did not affect reliability. Validity data showed inconsistency between CBM and standardized test scores. The measures were sensitive to student…

A method is presented for using a restricted latent class model--a binary skills model--to determine skills required by a set of test items. Results from the method's application to reading achievement data for about 63,000 fourth graders indicate that the model offers useful information on test structure and examinee ability. (TJH)

Attempts to answer the question whether indentifiably separate levels of reading comprehension exist by judgmentally using 9 teachers at the University of Lancaster and empirically using 100 students from Bombay university. (Author/VWL)

Two methods for constructing differentiated school norms and computing percentile ranks for school mean achievement accounting for demographic background factors are illustrated. These methods, which account for socioeconomic conditions that are beyond the control of the school, are applied to two large samples of schools (n=1,573 and n=797,…

Seventeen Canadian teachers and administrators were interviewed to determine their perspectives on reading education. Forty-two interviews were transcribed and evaluated. Preliminary analysis reveals that assessment as a social-psychological phenomenon is filled with tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas that cannot be solved simply through…

The Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised is a set of tests designed to measure cognitive abilities, scholastic aptitude, and achievement in the areas of reading, mathematics, and written language, in individuals aged 2-95 years. This paper describes the test battery's administration, scoring, standardization, reliability, and…

The emergence of publicly subsidized preschool raises important policy questions about the role of market forces and, in places where competition to provide these services exists, presents a setting in which the effects of competition on educational outcomes can be tested. We test neo-institutional hypotheses concerning the effects of competition…

Apart from the annual returns to the Ministry of Education of Reading Recovery (RR) data (and to a lesser extent, the four-yearly National Education Monitoring Project cycle data), there is currently no national data sets of reading achievement information for New Zealand primary school children. This article uses the national RR data for 2002 as…

Components of the School Renaissance[R] program, including Accelerated Reader and Reading Renaissance, have been implemented in more than 65,000 schools in the United States. Despite the program's popularity, there have been no published, well-controlled evaluations of its effectiveness. This randomized field experiment was designed to gauge…

Within the current climate of heightened interest in the education of young children, it is essential that consideration be given to different factors which may impact, either positively or negatively, on the achievement of young learners when their academic progress in literacy and numeracy is considered. The research study reported in this paper…