The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) reading Rasch unIT (RIT) score and State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS) reading achievement among English learners in Grades 8 and 9. The study also…

Given the increasing emphasis of communicative competence in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and the lack of validation research on speaking assessments for adolescent EFL learners, in the current study we examined the validity of the TOEFL Junior® speaking test, a relatively new speaking assessment developed by Educational Testing…

This study investigates the effect of bilingualism on learning English as a foreign language (L3), examining the impact of manner and sequence of bilingual acquisition and learning as well as language use practices in language minority children. With a sample of 1295 German eighth and ninth graders (bilingual: n = 456, monolingual: n = 839), we…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that more accurately, compared to previous assessments, measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments include both English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA/L) and…

Student performance on high stakes testing in secondary education has contributed to the need for students' testing potential to be identified before entering high school. There is evidence to suggest that a greater understanding of how earlier test scores predict later test scores will help educators and school officials increase student…

Several types of help options have been incorporated into reading and listening comprehension activities to aid second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. Textbook authors, teachers, and sometimes even students may pick and choose which help options they wish to use. In this paper, I investigate the effects of two help options in a multimedia…

The purpose of this correlational study was to examine Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) scores of 8th grade students and End of Course Test (EOCT) scores of the same students as 9th graders in the areas of language arts and mathematics to test the theory that a relationship exists between the two tests. The study also examined…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…

Purpose: The authors created a database of expository oral language samples with the aims of describing the nature of students' expository discourse and providing benchmark data for typically developing preteen and teenage students. Method: Using a favorite game or sport protocol, language samples were collected from 235 typically developing…

This report focuses on the initial development of the predicted score paths for ACT Aspire reporting. The paths provide predicted score ranges for the next two years--as well as predicted ACT score ranges for tests administered at grades 9 and 10. Longitudinal ACT Aspire data for students tested in spring 2013 and spring 2014, as well as…

The goal of this action research is to increase student awareness of context clues, with an emphasis on student use of visual cues in making predictions. Visual cues in the classroom were used to differentiate according to the needs of student demographics (Herrera, Perez, & Escamilla, 2010). The purpose of this intervention was to improve…

The guiding principles and procedures for pupil assessment in Portuguese compulsory education were established by the Implementing Order No. 1/2005, 5th January, with amendments introduced by the Implementing Orders No. 18/2006, 14th March and No. 5/2007, 10th January, and apply to the learning objectives and competencies defined for the various…

The e-rater® system has been used by ETS for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (v.2.0) that differs from the previous one (v.1.3) with regard to the feature set and model building approach. The paper describes the new version, compares the new and previous versions in terms of performance, and…