This quantitative study conducted in the ESL program at a large community college investigated the symbiotic relationship between reading and second-language learning from the perspective of the class of post-secondary functional bilinguals sometimes referred to as Generation 1.5. These students are long-term, resident second-language (L2) English…

The No Child Left Behind Act resulted in increased school-level implementation of assessment-based school interventions that aim to improve student performance. Diagnostic assessments are included among these interventions, designed to help teachers use evidence about student performance to modify and differentiate instruction and improve student…

Throughout this action research project report, the teacher-researchers explored the problem of test anxiety among students. The purpose of this project was to alleviate test anxiety among students with various interventions in grades five through seven in the subject areas of social studies, science, and language arts. There were 66 student…

Standard least squares analysis of variance methods suffer from poor power under arbitrarily small departures from normality and fail to control the probability of a Type I error when standard assumptions are violated. This article describes a framework for robust estimation and testing that uses trimmed means with an approximate degrees of…

Criteria had been proposed for assessing the severity of possible test security violations for computerized tests with high-stakes outcomes. However, these criteria resulted from theoretical derivations that assumed uniformly randomized item selection. This study investigated potential damage caused by organized item theft in computerized adaptive…

Minimal research has been conducted contrasting the effectiveness of various testing accommodations for college students diagnosed with ADHD. The current assumption is that these students are best served by extending the time they have to take a test. It is the supposition of these investigators that paced item presentation may be a more…

Recent advances in educational technologies and the wide-spread use of computers in schools have fueled innovations in test construction and analysis. As the measurement accuracy of a test depends on the quality of the items it includes, item selection procedures play a central role in this process. Mathematical programming and the item response…

U.S. state educational testing programs administer tests to track student progress and hold schools accountable for educational outcomes. Methods from item response theory, especially Rasch models, are usually used to equate different forms of a test. The most popular method for estimating Rasch models yields inconsistent estimates and relies on…

The 2006-2007 school year was the eighth annual reporting period since disaggregating the performance of students with disabilities on state and district-wide assessments was required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It is the fifth reporting period since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and the…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' accommodation recommendations for students during large-scale tests using two different methods to assist teachers with the decision-making process. Then we present descriptive data on teacher recommended accommodations for two case students who had presenting data to warrant changes in the manner…

Research on teaching and learning indicates that all students should be provided with programs, services, and teachers that engage them in rigorous academic work and promote deep disciplinary knowledge and higher order thinking skills (Walqui, 2006; Sanders & Rivers, 1996). Despite research findings on the importance of high quality teachers…

To determine the extent to which knowledge of evidence-based reading instruction and mathematics is assessed on licensure tests for prospective special education teachers, this study drew on information provided by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, and National Evaluation Systems (now…

Mandarin Chinese and many other tonal languages use tones that are defined as specific pitch patterns to distinguish syllables otherwise ambiguous. It had been shown that tones carry at least as much information as vowels in Mandarin Chinese [Surendran et al., 2005]. Surprisingly, though, many speech recognition systems for Mandarin Chinese have…

Growth modeling using longitudinal data seems to be a promising direction for improving the methodology associated with the accountability movement. Longitudinal modeling requires that the measurements of ability are comparable over time and on the same scale. One way to create the vertical scale is through concurrent estimation with…

This mixed methods study (Creswell, 2008) was designed to test the influence of collaborative testing on learning using a quasi-experimental approach. This study used a modified embedded mixed method design in which the qualitative and quantitative data, associated with the secondary questions, provided a supportive role in a study based primarily…