These are the appendixes for the report, "Strengthening the Pennsylvania School Climate Survey to Inform School Decisionmaking." This study analyzed Pennsylvania School Climate Survey data from students and staff in the 2021/22 school year to assess the validity and reliability of the elementary school student version of the survey;…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

Despite the importance of analytic text-based writing, relatively little is known about how to teach to this important skill. A persistent barrier to conducting research that would provide insight on best practices for teaching this form of writing is a lack of outcome measures that assess students' analytic text-based writing development and that…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be used to score oral reading fuency (ORF) assessments to ameliorate current inadequacies (e.g., administration errors, high opportunity cost), and represents an important part of a larger solution to improve traditional ORF. But more research is needed on how ASR performs for diverse student groups. The…

The use of student achievement data to evaluate an individual teacher's effectiveness has become a new focus in educational policy. This article focuses on the underresearched teacher perception of this new policy measure. Drawing on ethnographic research procedures, this article explores how first-grade teachers in one state navigated a new…

The Cognitively Based Assessment of, for, and as Learning ("CBAL"™) research initiative is aimed at developing an innovative approach to K-12 assessment based on cognitive competency models. Because the choice of scoring and equating approaches depends on test dimensionality, the dimensional structure of CBAL tests must be understood.…

Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable deficiencies are found in L2 students' vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way words are distributed is ignored.…

This mixed methods study combining a single-subject experimental design with an embedded case study focuses on the impact of a visual treatment on the handwritten and typed output of a struggling male writer during his 5th through 7th grades who has undergone a longitudinal remedial phase of two and a half years creating text-only material as well…

The purpose of this article is to describe the relationship of initial skill and rate of progress on a measure of the alphabetic principle, Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF), to first-grade reading outcomes as measured by Oral Reading Fluency (ORF). In addition, we describe a scoring approach to NWF where the predominant decoding strategy (i.e.,…

Recent studies indicate that examiners make a number of intentional and unintentional errors when administering reading assessments to students. Because these errors introduce construct-irrelevant variance in scores, the fidelity of test administrations could influence the results of evaluation studies. To determine how assessment fidelity is…

This Southeastern state was awarded one of the first two Race to The Top (RTTT) grants the U. S. Department of Education funded. A key piece of the state's winning application was a legislative mandate to implement an intensive, quantitative, and accountability driven teacher evaluation system beginning with the 2011-2012 school year. The new law…

In K-12 environments in the US, classroom tests are a central means by which teachers assess English Language Learner (ELL) content knowledge. Performance on routine classroom assessments is often a contributing criterion for school based decision-making and can affect decisions relating to academic tracking, retention, and access to academic…

This report presents findings from two years of classroom observation designed to help understand the in-school experiences of students who had been first graders in eight Baltimore public schools in 2007-08. During the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, the authors conducted fieldwork to understand learning opportunities and settings for a set of…

This document sets forth recommendations for the design of a new science assessment. The assessment resulting from this framework will start a new NAEP science trend (i.e., measure of student progress in science) beginning in 2009. This framework represents a unique opportunity to build on previous NAEP science work as well as key developments in…

Only a small number of qualitative studies have investigated panelists' experiences during standard-setting activities or the thought processes associated with panelists' actions. This qualitative study involved an examination of the experiences of 11 panelists who participated in a prior, one-day standard-setting meeting in which either the…