The New Jersey Education Association charges that serious reporting errors in the state's minimum basic skills (MBS) testing program are causing some children to be falsely labelled as failures and are leading to misallocation of State Compensatory Education Aid, which is based on a formula using MBS scores. (SJL)

All New Jersey students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11 are tested annually in basic reading and computation skills using the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills (MBS) Tests. The MBS testing program was initiated in 1976. The former Educational Assessment Program tests were used during the tramsition, and test development activities were begun in 1977.…

This report is designed to provide New Jersey Congressional legislators with current information on the effectiveness of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 (ECIA) Chapter 1 Program in New Jersey. Data on the reading and mathematics performance of ECIA Chapter 1 students in grades 2 through 8 from participating districts were…

A minimum standards amendment to the New Jersey Public School Act of 1975 requires the testing of public school students to determine proficiency in the minimum basic skills of reading and mathematics, under the auspices of the New Jersey State Department of Education's Educational Assessment Program. To meet the mandates of this amendment, the…

New Jersey's statewide testing program demonstrates that systematic data collection and reporting can have a major impact on both understanding the gap between college expectations and high school preparation and on the college and pre-college efforts to close that gap. (Author/MLW)

An overview is presented of the New Jersey Department of Education's activities in response to the following mandates: (1) statewide minimum standards be established for communication/computation skills; (2) students be tested annually in these areas to determine progress; and (3) remediation be provided to all students whose performance is below…

This report is the beginning of a series that will examine the performance of the school children of New Jersey relative to the performance of other children in the United States and worldwide. The measure of performance used was the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics examinations and their linked versions of the…

The New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test was administered to 42,984 freshmen entering New Jersey colleges and universities and four independent colleges in the fall of 1978 in order to assess students' specific strengths and weaknesses in reading, writing, and mathematics for placement in appropriate first-year courses. Based on test…

At the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the call for all students to be "proficient" in reading and mathematics by 2014. Yet the law expects each state to define proficiency as it sees fit and design its own tests. This study investigated three research questions related to this policy: (1) How consistent are various…

This report on trends in school improvement test results presents an analysis and synthesis of 1978-1984 student performance data from four state-mandated testing programs: (1) the Educational Quality Assessment Program in Pennsylvania; (2) the Minimum Basic Skills Program in New Jersey; (3) the Delaware Educational Assessment Program in Delaware;…

The New Jersey Educational Assessment Program (EAP) is a statewide testing program used to assess reading and mathematics achievement, and to provide useful information to educational decision makers at the state and local levels. In May 1976, the State Department of Education conducted a survey of all local school superintendents regarding their…

For the past 8 years, Research for Better Schools, Inc. (RBS) has prepared an analysis of state-wide trends in student achievement in the mid-Atlantic states (i.e., Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). For this year, instead of quantitatively examining trends in student achievement scores, RBS decided to…

Results of the second year of the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Tests in reading and mathematics, mandated by the New Jersey Public School Education Act of 1975, are summarized. Approximately 397,000 students in grades three, six, nine, and eleven were tested. Results of the tests showed that a smaller percentage of sixth-grade students met…

In 1976, New Jersey public law established uniform statewide minimum standards in the basic communication and computational skills for publicly educated students in the state. To implement the law for the year 1976-77, the New Jersey Educational Assessment Program administered tests to all fourth, seventh, and tenth grade students. These tests…

Reflecting concern with the nationwide decline in basic skills mastery, the 1975 statewide basic skills tests of the New Jersey Educational Assessment Program (NJEAP) were used to assess the relative performance of college bound seniors. The results of a random 10% sample of the 55,000 students in college preparatory programs were compared with…