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…

This report provides an overview of what was known about alternative assessment at the time that the article was written in 1991. Topics include beliefs about assessment reform, overview of alternative assessment including research knowledge, evidence of assessment impact, and critical features of alternative assessment. The author notes that in…

We describe some of Merl's more subtle contributions that extended beyond his own prodigious scholarly record, his high-quality teaching, and his mentoring of students. The context of our remarks on Programmatic R&D focuses on his contribution to the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Education. Merl was the first director of…

The focus of this chapter is on the description and assessment of teachers' social psychological factors, using the scientific literature as a base. Research on teachers' social psychological domains has an ultimate goal of populating classrooms with competent people who can model and incite behaviors that assist students in their own learning.…

This report describes results from field-testing of POWERSOURCE[C] formative assessment alongside professional development and instructional resources. The researchers at the National Center for Research, on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST) employed a randomized, controlled design to address the following question: Does the…

Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure…

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…

The evaluation of educational interventions requires assessments that consistently (reliably) produce data from which accurate (valid) inferences about the test subjects can be made for some stated purpose. Despite codified definitions of all these terms, there remains vibrant debate about the assessment design process and how measures of…

We conducted generalizability studies to examine the extent to which ratings of language arts performance assignments, administered in a large, diverse, urban district to students in second through ninth grades, result in reliable and precise estimates of true student performance. The results highlight three important points when considering the…

Assessing whether students can both re-present a corpus of learned knowledge and also demonstrate that they can apply that knowledge to solve problems is key to assessing student understanding. This notion, in turn, impacts our thinking about what we assess, how we author such assessments, and how we interpret assessment results. The diffusion of…