In 2012, the Ministry of Education, Afghanistan, engaged the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) as a partner to support the development of a national learning assessment program in Afghanistan. To achieve this goal, the Learning Assessment unit of the Ministry of Education and ACER have collaborated to design and implement the…

Development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the creation of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), changes the pattern of accountability testing. These changes raise the question: "How should NAEP's validity and utility be…

This paper reports on an analysis of large-scale assessments of Grades 5-8 students' writing across 10 provinces and 2 territories in Canada. Theory, classroom practice, and the contributions and constraints of large-scale writing assessment are brought together with a focus on Grades 5-8 writing in order to provide both a broad view of…

While formal, standardized assessment instruments provide valuable and necessary information about students' various abilities and skills, the use of informal and qualitative assessment approaches has the benefit of leading directly to instruction based squarely on an individual student's needs, strengths, and existing skills. This article…