A number of states have school building accountability systems that rely on comparisons of achievement from one year to the next. Improvement of the performance of schools is judged by changes in the achievement of successive groups of students. Year-to-year changes in scores for successive groups of students have a great deal of volatility. The…

Studied the stability of accountability scores and gains for schools using fourth-grade reading results for schools (samples from 757 to 802 schools) in Colorado for 4 years of administration of the Colorado Student Assessment Program. Year-to-year changes were found to be quite unstable, resulting in a near zero correlation of the school gains…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress' (NAEP) 1992 reading assessment was administered to nationally representative samples of 4th-, 8th- and 12-grade students attending public and private schools, and to state representative public-school samples of 4th graders in 43 jurisdictions. In Colorado, 2,897 fourth-grade students in 122 public…

In 1998 it became apparent that support for state assessments in Spanish at the elementary level was waning in Colorado, and it was likely that only an English-language version would be available for the grade 5 mathematics assessment in 1999. A study was conducted to provide empirical results to inform decisions regarding language accommodations…

In 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) included a Trial State Assessment (TSA); for the first time in NAEP's history, voluntary state-by-state assessments were made. In 1994, TSA was expanded to include non-public school students. The 1994 reading assessment considered students' proficiency in situations that involved…

Since middle schools vary in their degree of implementation of middle school practices, this research was designed to compare the job satisfaction of middle school teachers with the degree of implementation of these practices. Six teachers from each of Colorado's 50 schools with the name "middle school" were randomly selected to serve as…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between gender, grade level, teachers, and the selection of mathematics software as measured by the type of mathematics software chosen, and time-on-task. Research data were collected from 202 third, fourth, and fifth grade students in a single elementary school located in northeastern…

Noting the need to include the views of youth in national debates about issues facing American youth today, a study focused on youths views about violence. Information was gleaned from literature reviews, expert panels, and focus groups, to design a survey examining relationships in the schools, homes, and communities, and aspects of youths lives…