Recent statistics presented for each state include American College Testing Program scores, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, high school graduation percentages and rankings, pupil-teacher ratio, average teacher salary, federal funding, per-pupil expenditures, expenditure as a percent of income per capital, per capita income, poverty rates, median…

Describes the Prueba de Lectura y Lenguaje Escrito (PPLE--roughly translatable as the "Test of Early Language Development") that may meet the need for standardized and diagnostic tests of reading and written composition in Spanish. (HOD)

Compares twelfth-grade students' performance on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) with their performance on the Metropolitan Achievement Test 1: Reading Survey or the Degrees of Reading Power Test, concluding that the findings challenge the notion that low SAT scores indicate a lack of basic reading skills. (HOD)

Should law schools decide to consider other than traditional academic student characteristics as admission criteria, the Law School Admission Council should undertake an extensive research program to design new instruments measuring a broad and perhaps more relevant range of applicant characteristics and skills. (MSE)

This report is the sixth analysis of state reports conducted by the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) to examine the extent to which states publicly report information about students with disabilities in statewide assessments. Descriptions of statewide testing systems are presented and examined as to whether these systems included…

Research shows that language-minority students both do poorly on standardized tests, and receive low academic ratings from their teachers (August & Hakuta, 1998). Explanations for the low performance, however, are limited. This is at least partially due to the fact that language-minority status is intimately entangled with issues related to…

This student handbook helps students in grades 6 and 7 to prepare for high school and college. It urges them to plan now so that they can get on the right track and take the classes they need. The handbook encourages these students to discover their strengths, weaknesses, interests, and abilities to learn how they can prepare them for their…

This brief describes how Maine's introduction of its ubiquitous 1-to-1 laptop program has been beneficial to learning, if one looks in the right places. There is growing positive evidence from teachers, parents, classroom assignments and tests, and even in one case, on a standardized test, all pointing toward a similar conclusion. Students are…

Possible relationships between five test examiner characteristics (gender, race, tenure, experience as a test administrator, and experience as a test developer or scorer) and six student achievement scores (reading, writing, language usage, mathematics, science, and social studies) were studied at the school level in a statewide assessment. The…

This manual offers states a tool to assist in the development or enhancement of guidelines for access assistants. Whether a state already has guidelines or is just in the process of establishing them, this manual will provide structure to the process and many examples of criteria already included by states. This manual was developed to accompany…

Every spring, education-related newspaper and magazine stories raise the alarm that schools are "teaching to the test." Scores of articles and editorials paint a disheartening picture of frustrated teachers forced to abandon good instructional practices for a relentless stream of worksheets based on boring, repetitive test-preparation…

This report is the first in a series of reports on teaching and learning in Foundation-supported schools. This report takes a careful look at instruction and students' academic work. In a subset of reforming schools, it examines whether students are exposed to challenging learning opportunities and whether challenging learning opportunities open…

Schools and school districts across the country are under pressure to show that student performance on standardized tests is improving. Much of this pressure is based on the idea that clear expectations, combined with sanctions for poor performance, will motivate educators and students to try harder and do better. The federal No Child Left Behind…

This study investigates relationships between teachers' receipt of high-stakes test score results of their students and subsequent changes in instructional and classroom assessment practices the following year. The sample consisted of 722 elementary, middle, and high school teachers. The results indicate that most teachers reported using the…

Recently NWEA completed a project to connect the scale of the WKCE with NWEA's RIT scale. Six Wisconsin school systems participated in the study, using test information from a group of over 1,500 students enrolled in fourth, eighth, and tenth grade who took both the WKCE and NWEA tests in the fall of 2003. Information from these tests was used in…