Our nation is in the midst of one of the largest education reforms in decades centered on the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and aligned assessments. In an era of rising accountability measures and declining literacy proficiency, it is vital to ensure that educational resources, such as benchmark assessments, are appropriately…

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter caused more than 8 million of lost school days. Within a matter of days, riots reached the national level with hundreds of…

The present study tested the possibility of operationalizing levels of knowledge acquisition based on Vygotsky's theory of cognitive growth. An assessment tool (SAM-Math) was developed to capture a hypothesized hierarchical structure of mathematical knowledge consisting of procedural, conceptual, and functional levels. In Study 1, SAM-Math was…

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the extent to which students who took a computer adaptive test of reading comprehension accounting for testlet effects were administered fewer passages and had a more precise estimate of their reading comprehension ability compared to students in the control condition. A randomized controlled…

The purpose of this technical report is to describe the third operational administration of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessments in the 2016-2017 academic year. PARCC is a state-led consortium creating next-generation assessments that, compared to traditional K-12 assessments, more accurately…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

This paper reported results from a generalizability study that examined the process of developing classroom practice indicators used to evaluate the impact of a school district's mathematics reform initiative. The study utilized classroom observational data from 32 second, fourth, eighth, and tenth grade teachers. The study addresses important…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium designed to create next-generation assessments that, compared to traditional K-12 assessments, more accurately measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments are aligned to the Common Core State Standards…

"This is the piece that's been missing." This reaction is common among educators engaged in AIW Iowa, an initiative that engages teachers and administrators in professional learning communities that are improving student achievement, increasing student engagement, and building a schoolwide professional culture focused on improving…

This study investigated U.S. ethnic majority and minority youth's perceptions of fair and unfair treatment by authorities and evaluations of three situations of interracial exclusion (N = 685). Findings revealed that older adolescents who reported fair treatment by authorities were more likely to perceive wrongfulness in interracial exclusion…

Item response theory (IRT) methods are generally used to create score scales for large-scale tests. Research has shown that IRT scales are stable across groups and over time. Most studies have focused on items that are dichotomously scored. Now Rasch and other IRT models are used to create scales for tests that include polytomously scored items.…

In practice, vertical scales have been continually used to measure students' achievement progress across several grade levels and have been considered very challenging psychometric procedures. Recently, such practices have been drawing many criticisms. The major criticisms focus on dimensionality and construct equivalence of the latent trait or…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…