The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to describe the associations between the specific Central Florida district's final instructional summative evaluation scores and student achievement scores for Grade 4 instructional staff teaching ELA or mathematics within the district for the school year 2017-2018. The self-determination…

As parents, communities, educators, and policymakers continue to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning in America, many have turned to recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP measures what students know and what they can do in several tested subjects, including reading,…

This study was conducted to explore US elementary teachers' perceptions of their experiences using rubrics as a tool for student self-assessment and metacognition (assessment for learning) to improve elementary students' achievement and their instructional decision-making at a private American elementary school in South Florida. The constructivist…

Behavior rating scales represent one of the most commonly used types of assessments in school psychology. Yet, they suffer from a fundamental limitation: They are an indirect methodology influenced partially by student behavior and partially by rater perspectives. Thus, the current study utilized advanced analytic approaches to evaluate rater…

Third grade is a critical checkpoint in a child's educational journey. By the end of third grade, children need literacy skills that prepare them for increasing curriculum demands in fourth grade and beyond. Students who are not reading on grade level by this point are significantly more likely to drop out of high school or fail to graduate on…

Most studies of test-based promotion policies focus on measuring the effect of retention (being left back) on later student outcomes, and the evidence is fairly mixed. However, test-based promotion policies do not only affect the students who are retained. Presumably, they also affect students and schools as they try to improve reading performance…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, using a randomized experimental design, the efficacy of TERC's "Using Data" program to change teacher behavior and improve student learning outcomes. The "Using Data" intervention provides professional development and technical assistance to teachers to help them use data…

This study defines subpopulation item parameter drift (SIPD) as a change in item parameters over time that is dependent on subpopulations of examinees, and hypothesizes that the presence of SIPD in anchor items is associated with bias and/or lack of invariance in three psychometric outcomes. Results show that SIPD in anchor items is associated…

In accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001, 100% of students were expected to become proficient on state assessments of reading and mathematics by the end of 2013-2014 academic year. Schools that consistently failed to meet the NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements were subject to penalties. In 2011, the U.S.…

The Florida Department of Education (FDOE) identified increasing the graduation rate of students with disabilities and decreasing the graduation gap between students with disabilities and all students as its state-identified measurable result (SIMR). To make progress toward the SIMR, the state sought to build the capacity of local education…

Several states have recently adopted or are pursuing policies that deny or revoke tenure from teachers who receive poor evaluation ratings over time based in part on quantitative measures of performance. Using data from the state of Florida, we estimate such value-added measures to consider the future effectiveness and number of teachers who would…

Two professional development (PD) models for teachers were compared on teacher and student outcomes. Special education teachers participated in Literacy Learning Cohorts (LLC), a PD innovation designed to improve content and pedagogical knowledge for providing reading instruction to upper elementary students with learning disabilities. The LLC,…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

Florida requires that students who do not meet grade-level reading proficiency standards on the end-of-year state assessment (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, FCAT) receive intensive reading intervention. With the stakes so high, teachers and principals are interested in using screening or diagnostic assessments to identify students with a…