The motivation for this paper is the authors' recent work on several randomized control trials in which they found the primary result, which averaged across subgroups or sites, to be moderated by demographic or site characteristics. They are led to examine a distinction that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) makes between "confirmatory"…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

The technical complexities and sheer size of international large-scale assessment (LSA) databases often cause hesitation on the part of the applied researcher interested in analyzing them. Further, inappropriate choice or application of statistical methods is a common problem in applied research using these databases. This article serves as a…

At present, although the percentages of students with disabilities (SDs) and/or students who are English language learners (ELL) excluded from a NAEP administration are reported, no statistical adjustment is made for these excluded students in the calculation of NAEP results. However, the exclusion rates for both SD and ELL students vary…

The purpose of this article is to document the legacy and continuing influence of Michael Pressley's work in the field of reading research and instruction. Descriptions are provided to demonstrate how he translated his data from the cognitive sciences into highly effective pedagogy. A second component of this article discusses how Michael…

An assessment framework is like a blueprint, laying out the basic design of the assessment by describing the mathematics content that should be tested and the types of assessment questions that should be included. It also describes how the various design factors should be balanced across the assessment. This is an assessment framework, not a…

In this paper we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance with a unique longitudinal data set covering all Florida public school students in grades 3-10 over a five-year period. Unlike many previous data sets used to study peer effects in education, our data set allow us to identify each member of a given student's…

This study focuses on the SeaTrek Distance Learning Project, housed at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. The educational goal of the SeaTrek project is to spark student interest in science and communicate information about real-world research and conservation work at Mote to students and teachers in Florida. To accomplish this goal, the…

This report documents the process undertaken to produce scales in three cognitive domains: knowing, applying, and reasoning. Included are the final scales showing differences among countries, as well as within countries. TIMSS 2003 is the third and most recently completed round of IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a very…

This volume describes the technical aspects of TIMSS 2003 and summarizes the main activities involved in the development of the data collection instruments, the data collection itself, and the analysis and reporting of the data. The thirteen chapters contained herein are: (1) Overview of TIMSS 2003 (Michael O. Martin and Ina V. S. Mullis); (2)…