The Austin Independent School District (AISD) is now in its third year of study on the effects of a new retention policy adopted in 1981-82. Reviewing the results of the first two years led to the conclusion that traditional methods of studying retention might not be the most appropriate. These evaluations have primarily focused on the impact of…

Linking Outcomes to Organizational Planning (LOOP) was initiated during the 1984-85 school year in the Austin (Texas) Independent School District. LOOP was designed to ensure that evaluation, research, and informal findings became part of the instructional planning loop; to provide information to the Superintendent on progress toward priorities…

Careful management of a testing program can greatly limit a teacher's opportunity to cheat while administering standardized tests to students and can increase the likelihood that such cheating will be detected. The Austin Independent School District's systemwide testing staff's plan for controlling cheating has three basic premises: (1) plan and…

Upon learning that a form of the Sequential Tests of Educational Progress was incorrectly distributed to an unidentified number of high school students along with an answer sheet pregridded with an alternate test form, the Austin Independent School District performed the following research analyses: (1) scored the tests using the key for each…

Inspired by four recent decisions to change achievement tests used in the Austin Independent School District, the separate forms used and procedures followed have been combined into a systematic approach intended for use in future achievement test selections. A rating scale (Attachment 1) was developed to expedite a systematic comparison among…

In certain situations, grade equivalent scores are the most appropriate statistic available for reporting achievement test data. It is noted that testing practitioners have found that raw scores, normal curve equivalents, stanines, and standard scores are very useful. However, it is best to convert to either grade equivalents or percentiles before…

For Texas's Career Ladder System of rewarding good teachers, teachers' performance evaluations from 1981 to 1984 were used to rank teachers in the Austin Independent School District. Significant biases were noted between raters, between years, and between elementary and secondary teacher ratings. To adjust for these biases, each teacher's raw…

A variety of methods are used by the Austin (Texas) Independent School District to report the results of student achievement testing. These techniques were developed to alleviate some of the problems that occurred previously: (1) a school's average score represents very few of its students because large numbers of students score very high or very…

This paper describes a methodology for the evaluation of dropout prevention programs, for calculating dropout rates, and for comparing alternative programs equitably. A first step involves developing a hierarchy of criteria for evaluating programs. These criteria are used to obtain dropout risk probability for individuals and groups and types of…

The Austin, Texas,Independent School District's Department of Management Information has developed a set of guidelines for responding to requests for information about the schools, as well as requests for research subjects. Procedures for handling external requests have been grouped into five categories. (1) Research: applications must be approved…