This study explored students' feelings during the Australian National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy. It features student voice depicted as self-drawn images accompanied by words as they journeyed through four phases of the NAPLAN process: preparation, participation, completion and results. The 34 students in Years 3, 5 and 7 attended…

The 10th anniversary of Common Core's launch offers the opportunity to take stock of the impact these nearly national standards have had on student learning, as well as their future prospects. In this article, Morgan Polikoff shares his view that the standards movement in general, and Common Core in particular, have achieved all they are going to…

This study was designed to firstly develop a corpus of Indonesia's junior high school (JHS) and senior high school (SHS) English textbooks (TB) and national examination (NE) texts. By means of corpus analysis, this study then attempted (1) to find out the vocabulary levels (i.e. distribution among the K1-K20, where K refers to 1000-word band in…

The efficacy of a research-based fraction sense intervention for sixth graders with or at risk for mathematics difficulties (N = 52) was examined. The intervention aimed to build understanding of fraction magnitudes on the number line. Key concepts were taught with a narrow range of denominators to develop deep understanding. The intervention was…

"Mathematical Thinking: From Assessment Items to Challenging Tasks" is a compilation of 36 problem-based lessons that encourage students to engage in productive struggle and deep thinking. Its 36 full-length lessons for grades 2-8 are each inspired by an actual test item from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).…

The 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Arts Assessment was administered to selected 8th grade students throughout the nation, and in 2009 the results from that administration were publicly reported. In the spring of 2010, building on the format and structure of the 2008 national assessment, the researcher administered a…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in subjects such as the arts, mathematics, reading, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. District staff play an essential role in NAEP. Superintendents and…

Multiple matrix designs are commonly used in large-scale assessments to distribute test items to students. These designs comprise several booklets, each containing a subset of the complete item pool. Besides reducing the test burden of individual students, using various booklets allows aligning the difficulty of the presented items to the assumed…

The National Center of Education Statistics conducted a mapping study that equated the percentage proficient or above on each state's NCLB reading and mathematics tests in grades 4 and 8 to the NAEP scale. Each "NAEP equivalent score" was labeled according to NAEP's achievement levels and used to compare state proficiency standards and…

This article reports on the effectiveness of an intervention using conceptual change approaches within challenging tasks, on the mathematics gains for low-performing year 3-6 students in in six primary schools. Quantitative data from PAT-Maths testing for each year showed a consistently large effect size of 0.7 compared to expected gain data from…

Science standards have been a topic in educational research in Austria for about ten years now. Starting in 2005, competency structure models have been developed for junior and senior classes of different school types. After evaluating these models, prototypic tasks were created to point out the meaning of the models to teachers. At the moment,…

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement from 2010 to 2013 have shown a downward trend in ninth graders' science average achievement scores from 2011 to 2013. The percentage of students in the Advanced level decreased dramatically from 19.95% in 2010 to 11.48% in 2013, while the percentage of students in the Basic level…

Many students do not meet expected standards of writing performance, despite the need for writing competence in and out of school. As policy instruments, writing content standards have an impact on what is taught and how students perform. This study reports findings from an evaluation of the content of a sample of seven diverse states' current…

National standards for student achievement have been developed in the arts in a process that paralleled the standards discussions being held in mathematics, language arts, science, history, and other areas. The standards process, while demanding, has generated important discussion and debate about which art forms, what kind of knowledge, and what…

In this article we explore the use of pictorial glossaries as an accommodation for English learners (ELs) with entry and emerging levels of English language proficiency. Drawing on survey responses from 98 middle school ELs and cognitive interviews with 10 of the survey participants, we examined the participants' preferences and experiences with…