State and school report cards provide a powerful avenue for states to reach families and the broader public as essential partners in improving student outcomes. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and many state legislatures require states to publish an array of education data including measures at the state, district, and school levels.…

Learning progressions (LPs) have seen a growing interest in recent years due to their potential benefits in the development of formative assessments for classroom use. Using an LP as the backbone of an assessment can yield diagnostic classifications of students that can guide instruction and remediation. In operationalizing an LP, assessment items…

This study presents the reliability and validity of the Teacher Evaluation Experience Scale--Teacher Form (TEES-T), a multidimensional measure of educators' attitudes and beliefs about teacher evaluation. Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 583 teachers were conducted on the TEES-T hypothesized five-factor model, as well as on alternative…

Despite the intuitive appeal of purpose as a subject of inquiry and its associations with positive life outcomes, empirical research on adolescent purpose is limited. This exploratory study examined several dimensions of purpose--classification, engagement, and commitment--based on essay and survey responses from a sample of 124 low-SES and…

This research focuses on ePortfolio assessment strategies that yield important accountability and reporting information. Under foundational categories of reliability, validity, and fairness, we present methods of gathering evidence from ePortfolio scores and their relationship to demographic information (gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic…

The purpose of this study was to describe the measures used to evaluate principals in New Jersey in the first (pilot) year of the new principal evaluation system and examine three of the statistical properties of the measures: their variation among principals, their year-to-year stability, and the associations between these measures and the…

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

Until recently, few valid and reliable assessments were available to measure young children's mathematics and science learning in a "comprehensive" way. Now, a number of mathematics assessments have been developed and subjected to testing (Klein, Starkey, & Wakeley, 2000; Ginsburg, 2008; Clements & Sarama, 2008), and progress has…

Approximately 70% of aviation accidents are attributable to human error. The greatest opportunity for further improving aviation safety is found in reducing human errors in the cockpit. The purpose of this quasi-experimental, mixed-method research was to evaluate whether there was a difference in pilot attitudes toward reducing human error in the…

This technical report summarizes the third independent factor analysis of the SERU/UCUES questionnaire responses of students with majors. The 2009 solution employed the same quantitative analysis used in the prior solutions--varimax orthogonal rotation to determine principal components followed by promax oblique rotation to identify…

Students with disabilities face a variety of challenges that extend beyond the classroom, as they are often behind their peers in social and life skills. As they exit their secondary education programs they are often ill prepared to meet the multi-dimensional demands of the work place. According to the United States Department of Labor (2011),…

The vast majority of public employees--including teachers--are enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans. These plans are usually the product of state legislation that determines eligibility, benefit formulas, employer and employee contributions, and how payments will be calculated when an employee retires or leaves the system. Once an employee…

In today's economy, employers increasingly demand that workers have a high school diploma, yet America's graduation rates are unacceptably low, particularly among poor and minority students. Nationally, only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma; for African American and Hispanic students, this…

Historically, states in the northeast region have differed considerably from neighboring states in the percentage of their special education student population served in different educational environments. Placement data indicate the degree to which students with disabilities are placed in the least restrictive environment (LRE) along the…