In the high-stakes accountability English educational system, decisions made by government and agencies about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment drive school planning and actions. This paper analyses the drivers for the recent change to French German and Spanish GCSEs and highlights particular areas of the new specification which may damage the…

This article looks at the changes made to examinations in England over recent decades and asks about the politics behind the changes. It considers how increasingly centralised the assessment regime has become, moving from a system where teachers could have a say in how pupils are assessed to a regime dominated by government approved tests. It…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) has updated its 2009 intervention report for SuccessMaker®, a set of computer-based courses designed to supplement regular K-8 reading instruction. The program is designed to improve skills in areas such as concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and…

We report the results of a test-retest and alternate form reliability study of grade 1, 3, 5, and 8 reading measures from the easyCBM assessment system. Approximately 50 students in each grade participated in the study. In Grade 1, we studied the following measures: Phoneme Segmenting, Letter Sounds, Letter Names, Word Reading Fluency, and Passage…