More than 40 percent of students in California's public schools speak a language other than English at home. In the 2016-17 school year, 21 percent of all students, or more than 1.3 million, were English Learners (ELs). When former English Learners are included, the population of "ever ELs" expands to 38 percent of all K-12 students in…

Policies that require the use of information about student achievement to evaluate teacher performance are becoming increasingly common across the United States, but there is some question as to how or whether to use student test-based teacher evaluations when student assessments change. We bring empirical evidence to bear on this issue.…

In a rigorous evaluation of ASSISTments as an online homework support conducted in the state of Maine, SRI International reported that "the intervention significantly increased student scores on an end-of-the-year standardized mathematics assessment as compared with a control group that continued with existing homework practices."…

For decades, standardized reading comprehension tests have consisted of a series of passages and associated multiple-choice questions. Although widely used in and out of the classroom, there continues to be considerable disagreement regarding how or whether such tests have net value in the service of advancing educational progress in reading. This…

Most research on linguistic features of test items negatively impacting English language learners' (ELLs') performance has focused on lexical and syntactic features, rather than discourse features that operate at the level of the whole item. This mixed-methods study identified two discourse features in 162 multiple-choice items on a standardized…