This report is the first in a series of five reports considering career-readiness features within high school assessments. Utilizing feature analysis and cognitive lab interviews, the primary objective of this study was to verify and validate the existence of specific career-readiness features in select math and English language arts (ELA) test…

The National Math + Science Initiative's (NMSI's) College Readiness Program (CRP) is an established program whose goal is to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in high schools to improve students' readiness for college. The program provides teacher, student, and school supports to promote high school students'…

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) is a nonprofit organization committed to improving educational outcomes that traces its roots back to the early 1990s. NMSI's College Readiness Program (CRP) is a long-standing program with the goal of promoting STEM education in high schools to improve students' preparation for college. The three-year…

This paper describes results from field testing of middle-school math formative assessments alongside professional development and instructional resources. We employed a randomised, controlled design to address the question: Does using our formative assessment strategies improve student performance on assessments of key mathematical ideas relative…

The POWERSOURCE[c] intervention is intended as a generalizable and powerful formative assessment strategy that can be integrated with any mathematics curriculum. POWERSOURCE[c] includes both a system of learning-based assessments and an infrastructure to support teachers' use of those assessments to improve student learning. The core undertaking…

The POWERSOURCE[C] intervention is intended as a generalizable and powerful formative assessment strategy that can be integrated with any on-going mathematics curriculum to improve teachers' knowledge and practice and, in turn, student learning. Combining theory and research in cognition, assessment and learning (for both adults and students) with…

The POWERSOURCE[c] intervention is a generalizable and powerful formative assessment-based strategy that can be integrated with any ongoing mathematics curriculum to improve teachers' knowledge and practice and, in turn, student learning. Our primary research objectives are based on our hypotheses that as a result of POWERSOURCE[c], teachers will…

This chapter discusses current methods of formative evaluation and suggests that these methods themselves need to be subjected to more critical research and evaluation in order to provide them with a more scientific base. Topics addressed include problems and methods associated with data gathering, evaluation designs, number of subjects available,…

The intent of formative evaluation is to improve programs as well as to justify their continuation. It is critical to separate clearly those functions of the evaluation which are political from those which may lead the way to instructional improvement. Data for formative evaluation should be gathered in an interpretable way at the level at which…

Two examples of the interaction between computer technology and assessment are described: a tool-based knowledge representation approach to assess content understanding and a team problem-solving task involving negotiation. The examples serve as the context for the exploration of validity, equity, and utility. (LZ)

The use of portfolio assessment as a method of evaluating the writing competence of elementary school students was studied. The study contained two components: (1) an empirical study of the utility and meaningfulness of using an analytic rubric developed for the evaluation of traditional writing samples to score student portfolios; and (2) a…

This chapter is limited to a discussion of formative evaluation procedures for the purpose of improving instructional programs. It provides some discussion about what formative evaluation is, what it is for, and some guidelines regarding how to go about the evaluation of instruction. The use of the term "instruction" is construed very broadly to…

This study investigated how domain specifications controlled topic and rater reliability. History students completed three performance tasks. For each topic, they took prior knowledge tests, read primary materials, and wrote explanatory essays. Using a theory-based scoring rubric, four raters scored all essays. The rubric worked similarly on the…

The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow (ACOT) program was designed to study what happens when "tomorrow's" educational resources, such as individual computer support, are available in the classroom. Student achievement and attitudes were evaluated at five elementary school and secondary school sites located in four states and encompassing…

This report summarizes the work conducted for the Artificial Intelligence Measurement System (AIMS) Project which was undertaken as an exploration of methodology to consider how the effects of artificial intelligence systems could be compared to human performance. The research covered four areas of inquiry: (1) natural language processing and…