This paper furthers the understanding of literacy being developed through this Special Issue by bringing a pluralistic, complex account of literacy into conversation with assessment. The rise of neoliberalism in education--and its related focus on standards, accountability, and efficiency--has seen literacy positioned as the "core…

Research has shown that schoolteachers often prepare children for success in standardized reading assessments by 'teaching to the test.' Concurrently, research exploring children's emergent literacies and 'school readiness' has shown that early childhood teachers often feel pressured to 'prepare' children for school and may do so by focusing on…

Background: A fundamental aim of standardized educational assessment is to achieve reliable discrimination between students differing in the knowledge, skills and abilities assessed. However, questions of the purity with which these tests index students' genuine abilities have arisen. Specifically, literacy and numeracy assessments may also engage…

Diversity in the classroom includes differences in the way students' brains learn, or neurodiversity. Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) affect increasingly large numbers of students. Education systems must work to meet the needs of these students and ensure that…

For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most dramatic trends in education over the past decade has been the shift towards the use of…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

In Australia, as in many western education systems over the last two decades, discourses of accountability and performativity have reshaped education policy that has in turn reorganised the work of school leaders and teachers. One of the effects of this reorganisation is increased attention to the production, analysis and display of student…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability promotes equal and full participation by children in education. Equity of educational access for all students, including students with disability, free from discrimination, is the first-stated national goal of Australian education. Australian federal disability discrimination law, the…

"PISA 2012 Data Tables, Figures, and Exhibits" is a companion publication to the report entitled: "Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Mathematics, Science, and Reading Literacy in an International Context. First Look at PISA 2012. NCES 2014-024". PISA 2012 assessed students' mathematics, reading, and science literacy.…

Early years teachers are in need of efficient measures to identify young students who are not making adequate progress in learning to read. The Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists (WARL) has been developed to meet this need. The test, a curriculum-based measure of word identification fluency, consists of a series of parallel lists of frequently…

Assessment has been at centre stage of educational reform in England and Wales in the past 15 years. This article argues that official educational assessment policy is essentially indifferent to the technical, pedagogic, and epistemological issues related to different forms of assessment. Policymakers are primarily concerned with…

Of all the areas related to the validity of the Commonwealth Secondary Scholarship Examination (CSSE) tests, that of predictive validity seems to have been studied most intensively. Since the inception of the CSSE scholarship scheme, a series of studies which have either examined the predictive validity of certain aspects of the scholarships, or…

The need to extend systematic assessment procedures for Australia's high school juniors and seniors to a broader range of learning outcomes, develop better reporting methods, and provide results that can be compared reasonably are discussed.Several approaches to achieving these objectives are compared. (MSE)

The article raises misgivings toward recent proposals to require standardized literacy testing for 10- to 14-year-olds in Australia. Three other papers on the dangers and possibilities of literacy assessment are reviewed. It is concluded that the teacher parent partnership and learning are threatened by an increased government role in assessment.…