Eighty-one fourth grade students were administered tests, tasks, and observations to investigate the relationship between IQ, rates of learning, scores on standardized achievement tests, and results of classroom observation. There was a substantial relationship between IQ, standardized tests, and rates of learning, but not classroom observation.…

This study examined the efficacy of teacher judgment in the process of setting mastery scores (cut scores) for fourth-grade mathematics in local school districts in Nebraska in terms of agreement between teacher classification of students and classification by the cut score obtained by this classification. The study also examined cut scores in…

In current mathematics reform, assessment is integral to effective instruction. However, accurate assessment of over three million limited English proficient (LEP) students in today's schools is of great concern. How does students' language proficiency affect the accuracy of teachers' assessment of students' mathematical understanding? This…

The study examined the behaviors of educable mentally handicapped (EMH) children in repairing their utterances when their listener requests clarification. Subjects were 10 EMH children, aged 11-13, with mental-aged matched controls. Repair behaviors were elicited using a picture description and matching game with a barrier between the subject and…

This study considered the possibility that different formats of objective test questions might differentially favor males or females and that males and females might respond differently to objective questions aimed at assessing abilities at different levels of Bloom's cognitive domain. Class tests were constructed on recently taught topics, with…

This study was a secondary analysis of data collected by staff of the Program for Complex Instruction (PCI). The purpose of the larger study was to investigate the effect on learning gains of having students know the content and performance standards on which they will be judged as well as the effect of using evaluation criteria. This study looks…

This paper proposes the use of students science notebooks as one possible unobtrusive method for examining some aspects of teaching quality. Students science notebooks were used to examine the nature of instructional activities in their science classrooms, the nature of teachers' feedback, and how these two aspects of teaching were correlated with…

Students at grades four and five were administered a writing assessment that was developed to correspond to the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) writing tasks at grade four. Teachers were trained to score the CLAS-like tasks according to the rubric developed by the State for CLAS. In addition, 164 students at three schools in the…

This paper challenges the assumption that meaning is in some way magically encoded within texts and argues that questions, when they are used simply as tools to lead readers to a single meaning, are inadequate as a means of reading comprehension assessment. The paper then goes on to describe one of a series of micro case studies that explored…

Student science journals were evaluated as an assessment tool to demonstrate student performance throughout the course and the opportunities students have to learn science in their classrooms. The study was conducted with 163 fifth graders from 7 classrooms, although 1 teacher did not collect student journals, reducing the sample size. Close and…

This document is a conference presentation on the use of portfolios as an evaluation tool for middle school music students. All of the pages are suitable for use with an overhead projector. Areas covered include reasons for teaching the arts as both an intellectual discipline and vocational education; Illinois state goals for musical learning for…

This study was designed to identify differences in the neurological functioning of three groups of children with developmental dyslexia and to assess whether any of the groups were characterized by a particular pattern of neurological soft signs. Subjects were 88 children, aged 11-14, who were identified as developmentally dyslexic. The children…

This paper examines the efforts of the Anchorage School District, Alaska, to improve the validity of its writing assessment as a useful tool for the training of teachers and the characterization of the quality of student writing. The paper examines how a number of changes in the process and scoring of the Anchorage Writing Assessment affected the…

A follow-up study to Stanford University's Teacher Assessment Project (TAP) investigated captioning as a means of making sense of portfolios and explored how the captioning process might provide a way to use student portfolios to link student assessment and teacher assessment. Each of four teachers (three third grade and one fourth grade) from the…

A study investigated whether a teacher-pupil conference could serve as a vehicle for gathering data from children on the self-assessment of learning. The "Worksamples Interview" (a 10-item questionnaire that focuses on different dimensions of children's work) was used with 93 children in Years 4, 5, and 6 in one school in a large city in…