There is extensive research in elementary education on effective practices that support academic success for students with mild to moderate disabilities in general education; however there is a dearth of research on high school inclusion practices. A survey examined the current inclusionary practices at a Central Coast High School. California…

There seems to always be a new twist on high school testing in the U.S.; testing that is, at least in part, mandated by federal education law. As someone who grew up taking the New York State Regents exams, the author has thinking about high school testing for a long time. In this report, the author offers some thoughts about the current state of…

The purpose of the study was twofold. The first purpose of the study was to determine if a correlation existed between the Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading (STAR), created and distributed by Renaissance, and the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) Achievement Test in Math and Reading for grade 3, grade 4, and grade 5.…

This Data Point examines the literacy and numeracy skills of U.S. men and women ages 16-65. The data are from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which measures adults' skill levels in literacy and numeracy, as well as their ability to solve problems using computers. PIAAC literacy and numeracy scores range…

Most students seeking to enroll in community college are required to take a placement test for math and English courses. Administrators are well aware of the shortcomings of using traditional placement tests alone, and state and college systems across the country are organizing multiple measures assessment (MMA) placement systems that will…

We make use of matched birth-school administrative data from Florida, coupled with an extensive survey of instructional policies and practices, to observe which policies and practices are associated with improved test performance for relatively advantaged students in a school, for relatively disadvantaged students in a school, for both, and for…

The purpose of this relational, nonexperimental, explanatory, cross-sectional study with quantitative methods was to explain the relationship, if any, between the administrative information technology budget as a proportion of the overall undistributed expenditure account on PK-12 and K-12 New Jersey public school districts' student achievement in…

This study examined one school district's attempt to accelerate the academic learning of a population of incoming kindergarten students through the students' participation in a pilot summer incoming-kindergarten intervention program known as Summer Learning Academies (SLA). The analyses examined the end-of-year (EOY) reading and mathematics…

The aim or the present study was to examine the relative importance of financial education in school and families and dispositional factors (competitiveness, work mastery, meta-cognition) in predicting financial literacy among Finnish adolescents. The data on the 4328 Finnish 15-year-olds was drawn from the PISA 2018 assessment. Financial literacy…

From a sociocognitive perspective, item parameters in a test represent regularities in examinees' item responses. These regularities are originated from shared experiences among individuals in interacting with their environment. Theories explaining the relationship between culture and cognition also acknowledge these shared experiences as the…

Despite historical emphasis on "specific" learning disabilities (SLDs), academic skills are strongly correlated across the curriculum. Thus, one can ask how specific SLDs truly are. To answer this question, we used bifactor models to identify variance shared across academic domains (academic "g"), as well as variance unique to…

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

Large-scale assessments (LSAs) use Mislevy's "plausible value" (PV) approach to relate student proficiency to noncognitive variables administered in a background questionnaire. This method requires background variables to be completely observed, a requirement that is seldom fulfilled. In this article, we evaluate and compare the…

The current study sought to examine the validity of a General English Achievement Test (GEAT), administered to university students in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year, by hybridizing differential information (DIF) and differential distractor function (DDF) analytical models. Using a purposive sampling method, from the target population…

Increasing linguistic diversity in classrooms has led researchers to examine the validity and fairness of standardized achievement tests, specifically concerning whether test score interpretations are free of bias and score use is fair for all students. This study examined whether mathematics achievement test items that contain complex language…