As students return to in-person instruction in the 2021-2022 school year, local education agencies (LEAs) must develop resource allocation strategies to support schools in need. Federal programs have provided resources to support restart and recovery. However, there is little consensus on how LEAs can target resources to support those schools most…

Using two states' grades 3 through 8 state assessment databases, this study documents the extent to which students were assigned testing accommodations for ELA or mathematics in only one of two consecutive years. The percentage of students with disabilities who were assigned accommodations in the current year only or in the prior year only in a…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers'…

In this article, we highlight the need for a precisely defined construct in score-based validation and discuss the contribution of cognitive theories to accurately and comprehensively defining the construct. We propose a framework for integrating cognitively based theoretical and empirical evidence to specify and evaluate the construct. We apply…

The purpose of the present study is to examine the language characteristics of a few states' large-scale assessments of mathematics and science and investigate whether the language demands of the items are associated with the degree of differential item functioning (DIF) for English language learner (ELL) students. A total of 542 items from 11…