An increasing number of parents are opting-out their children from high-stakes. Accountability systems in education have used students' test scores to measure student learning, teacher effectiveness, and school district performance. Students who are opted-out of high-stakes tests are not being evaluated by the state tests, making their level of…

Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) Science for use with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) assessments are available for the 2016-17 school year. These new assessments measure student growth toward understanding of the multidimensional NGSS performance expectations. This report presents MAP Science for use with NGSS by presenting and…

Houston's experience with the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (R) (EVAAS) raises questions that other districts should consider before buying the software and using it for high-stakes decisions. Researchers found that teachers in Houston, all of whom were under the EVAAS gun, but who taught relatively more racial minority students,…

This study investigated the relation between the easyCBM Benchmark Assessments in both mathematics and reading and the Smarter Balanced assessment, widely adopted across the United States. Data for the study were obtained from a convenience sample of approximately 1,000 students per grade in grades 3-8 provided by two school districts in the…

To meet the constantly changing needs of schools and diverse learners, educators must frequently monitor student learning, revise curricula, and improve instruction. Consequently, it is critical that careful analyses of student performance data are ongoing components of curriculum decision-making processes. The primary purpose of this study is to…

The practical need for multidimensional measures of fidelity of implementation (FOI) of reform-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instructional materials, combined with a theoretical need in the field for a shared conceptual framework that could support accumulating knowledge on specific enacted program elements across…

Students with disabilities have traditionally achieved to a lesser degree than have their nondisabled peers. Since the 1950s the federal government has enacted laws to provide free, appropriate public education to students with disabilities. In the first decade of the 21st; Century the government has produced legislation requiring schools to be…

This paper reports the results of a descriptive study on the use of a technology-enhanced formative assessment system called Accelerated Math (AM) for ELLs and their native-English-speaking (NES) peers. It was comprised of analyses of an extant database of 18,549 students, including 2,057 ELLs, from grades 1 through 8 across 30 U.S. states. These…

This study explored the relationships among the components of the Arizona Department of Education's new teacher evaluation model, with a particular focus on the extent to which ratings from the state model's teacher observation instrument differentiated higher and lower performance. The study used teacher-level evaluation data collected by the…

Accountability in the nation's public schools has become a matter of considerable urgency since the 2001 amendment of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Under this most recent version of the ESEA, as of the 2007-08 academic year states and districts must assess the mathematics and reading proficiency of students…

To many, it seems obvious which schools are failing--schools whose students perform poorly on achievement tests. But since evaluating schools on achievement mixes the effects of school and nonschool influences, achievement-based evaluation likely underestimates the effectiveness of schools that serve disadvantaged populations. In this article, the…

Recently the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) completed a project to connect the scale of the MCA and BST with NWEA's RIT scale. Six Minnesota systems participated in the study, using test information from a group of over 13,000 students enrolled in third, fifth, and eighth grades who took these Minnesota Assessments and NWEA tests in the…