Students' performance on standardized tests is clearly predictive of their later outcomes (Goldhaber & Özek, 2019) but whether the costs of administering tests are justified by the value of the tests for improving students' outcomes is controversial. This controversy fuels heated debates over federal testing requirements, such as those…

This research is a developmental research aiming at developing a good mathematical test instrument using polytomous responses based on classical and modern theories. This research design uses the Plomp model, which consists of five stages, (1) preliminary investigation, (2) design, (3) realization/construction, (4) revision, and (5) implementation…

In this report, RAND researchers investigate one specific issue that may contaminate utilization of COVID-19--era school-aggregate scores and result in faulty comparisons with historical and other proximal aggregate scores: changes in school composition over time. To investigate this issue, they examine data from NWEA's Measures of Academic…

School officials regularly use school-aggregate test scores to monitor school performance and make policy decisions. After the U.S. Department of Education offered assessment waivers to all 50 states in 2019-2020, many educators and policymakers advocated for assessment programs to be restarted in the 2020-2021 school year to evaluate the state of…

We investigated the effect of retrieval practice (i.e., the use of testing to enhance learning) by middle school students on science learning in an authentic educational setting. For initial study, all students (n = 39) read a science text and made study notes about the text, a regular study activity in their course. For restudy (2 days later),…

This self-paced online course provides educators with detailed information on creating and using performance assessments. Through five 30-minute modules, practitioners, instructional leaders, and administrators will learn the foundational concepts of assessment literacy and how to develop, score, and use performance assessments. They will also…

National high-stakes exams are a fundamental structural feature of education systems around the world. Despite their importance in shaping educational stratification, little is known about the social processes that influence how and why national high-stakes exams are used at early ages on a global basis. I argue that global trends in the use of…

Language tests, including international high-stakes English proficiency tests widely used around the world, are to be viewed as ideological constructs connected with power relations and center-periphery demarcations at different social levels. In this paper, we examine the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as an instance of…

Purpose: This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the "universality" of POMAS and its suitability to track…

The lesson to be learnt from a quarter of a century of resisting standardised testing is that educational and pedagogical issues must drive campaigning. Teachers must work together to re-establish confidence in their own ability to control the curriculum and what is offered to our children. This can only be a collective enterprise and teachers…

Language proficiency is assumed to play a role in achievement in tertiary education. When requirements for university entrance are low or demographic changes in the population take place, universities often employ post-admission language assessments to screen all incoming students. In this study, we will look at the predictive validity of a…

Purpose: This study reports on data from a survey of speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) language assessment practices for elementary school-age children. The objective was to investigate the regularity with which SLPs use different types of assessments (described across data types, task types, environmental contexts, and dynamic features). This…

We are developing the Equitable Screening to Support Youth (ESSY) Whole Child Screener to address concerns prevalent in existing school-based screenings that impede goals to advance educational equity using universal screeners. Traditional assessment development does not include end users in the early development phases, instead relying on a…

Many scholars compared various item discrimination indices in real or simulated data. Item discrimination indices, such as item-total correlation, item-rest correlation, and IRT item discrimination parameter, provide information about individual differences among all participants. However, there are tests that aim to select a very limited number…

The introductory article of the GSE special issue 'PISA for scandalization, PISA for projection: the use of international large-scale assessments in education policy making' contextualises the four articles of the special issue in the broader context of comparative policy studies in education. It reflects in particular on the question of why…