Social changes have resulted in an increase of students living in households that do not include both a mother and a father, reducing the efficacy of common survey questionnaire approaches to measuring student socioeconomic status (SES). This paper presents two studies conducted to develop and test a new,more inclusive set of student SES items…

The academic achievement gap is a persistent and pernicious educational challenge confounded with race and socioeconomic status. The achievement gap persists despite over three decades of interventions and federal, state, and local policies and initiatives meant to close it. We examine the achievement gap in one of the most diverse states in the…

A fundamental claim for Common Core State Standards (CCSS)-aligned assessments is that they will lead to better teaching practices. The purpose of this study is to seek evidence in support of this claim by surveying teachers about their instructional practices, test preparation strategies, and test score use both before and after the introduction…

This study presents estimates of Black-White, Hispanic-White, and income achievement gaps using data from two different types of reading and mathematics assessments: constructed-response assessments that were likely more cognitively demanding and state achievement tests that were likely less cognitively demanding (i.e., composed solely or largely…

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.…

To answer questions about how students' proficiencies are changing over time, educational researchers are looking for data sources that span many years. Clearly, for answering questions about student growth, a longitudinal study--in which a single sample is followed over many years--is preferable to repeated cross-sectional samples--in which a…

This study investigates the benefits of no-stakes educational testing during students' summer vacation as a strategy to mitigate summer learning loss. Fifty-one students in Grades 3-8 from the Every Child Valued (ECV) and Lawrence Community Center (LCC) summer programs in Lawrenceville, NJ, took short, online assessments throughout the summer,…

The general diagnostic model (GDM) utilizes located latent classes for modeling a multidimensional proficiency variable. In this paper, the GDM is extended by employing a log-linear model for multiple populations that assumes constraints on parameters across multiple groups. This constrained model is compared to log-linear models that assume…

This study examined the impact of a read-aloud accommodation on standardized test scores of reading comprehension at Grades 4 and 8. Under a repeated measures design, students with and without reading-based learning disabilities took both a standard administration and a read-aloud administration of a reading comprehension test. Results show that…

This report describes the derivation and evaluation of a method for comparing the performance standards for public school students set by different states. It is based on an approach proposed by McLaughlin and associates, which constituted an innovative attempt to resolve the confusion and concern that occurs when very different proportions of…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…

A multitude of methods has been proposed to estimate the sampling variance of ratio estimates in complex samples (Wolter, 1985). Hansen and Tepping (1985) studied some of those variance estimators and found that a high coefficient of variation (CV) of the denominator of a ratio estimate is indicative of a biased estimate of the standard error of a…

In this paper, a data perturbation method for minimizing the possibility of disclosure of participants' identities on a survey is described in the context of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The method distinguishes itself from most approaches because of the presence of cognitive tasks. Hence, a data edit should have minimal…

This paper extends the theory of conditional covariances to polytomous items. It has been mathematically proven that under some mild conditions, commonly assumed in the analysis of response data, the conditional covariance of two items, dichotomously or polytomously scored, is positive if the two items are dimensionally homogeneous and negative…