Timely and credible data on student learning has become a global issue in the ongoing effort to improve educational outcomes. With the potential to serve as a powerful diagnostic tool to gauge the overall health and well-being of an educational system, educational assessments have received increasing attention among specialists and the media.…

For decades, when elected officials, researchers, educators, and parents have wanted a clear-eyed measure of what students know in a range of subjects, they have turned to an authoritative source: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Now the country stands poised to enter a new testing era. All but two states have agreed to work…

This article is an outgrowth of the evaluation and assessment process in a large interdisciplinary studies (IDS) program at West Virginia University. We argue for the importance of collecting and assessing quantitative and qualitative data concerning learning outcomes, student satisfaction, career choice and development, and graduate education…

Worldwide, the interest of policy-makers in participating in studies from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been growing rapidly over the past two decades. These studies offer the opportunity to relate the teaching and…

[Slides] presented at the Annual Meeting of National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in San Diego, CA in April 2009. This presentation describes how the vehicles for gathering student evidence--task models and test specifications--are developed.

The National Child Count of Children and Youth who are Deaf-Blind is the first and longest running registry and knowledge base of children who are deaf-blind in the world. Begun in 1986 on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, it represents a nearly thirty year collaborative effort between the National Center on Deaf-Blindness (NCDB), its…

Co-teaching occurs when a special educator and a general education teacher teach together in an inclusive classroom. Co-teaching has been adopted across the United States as the solution to meet the legal mandates of No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act. These pieces of legislation require schools to have…

The purpose of this study is to describe what data preschools in a mid-sized city in the Northeast collect, how they use that data, and the challenges they face. The study focuses on three types of data: early learning outcomes, dosage (i.e., the amount of exposure to early childhood education), and classroom quality. The report further…

This "Stated Briefly" report is a companion piece that summarizes the results of another report of the same name. This study explores how seven early childhood education programs in a mid-sized city in the Northeast region are collecting and using data, how they would like to use data, how they could use the data that they have, and the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if students' perceptions of quality differed between Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology (JRCERT) accredited and non JRCERT-accredited radiography programs using the quality dimensions of curriculum, faculty, facilities and equipment, integrity, student outcomes, and overall…

Authentic assessments are naturalistic methods to obtain functional, contextual information relevant to learning in routine activities. Seven focus groups were conducted with 73 practicing Part C early interventionists to gather their reports on authentic assessments. Participants reported various ways of applying authentic assessment methods,…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has placed a significant focus on standards. Understandably, classroom teachers are focused on effectively covering their content area standards and are often reluctant to add information literacy skills to their lessons because they see no direct connection to the state achievement tests. However, a close…

We used four different methods to determine the best means of assessing over 200 preservice elementary teachers' growth in knowledge of models and their use in K-8 classrooms while participating in the Science Capstone course that focused on the unifying themes of models in science. Each assessment method probed a different aspect of models (from…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not elementary classroom teachers' exploration of an integrated theoretical model of formative assessment would change participants' understandings of formative assessment and whether or not participants would apply this newly-acquired knowledge to their classroom assessment practices. After…

The most effective way to understand what a child knows about the reading process is to take a running record. In "Running Records", Mary Shea demonstrates how teachers can use this powerful tool to design lessons that decrease reading difficulties, build on strengths, and stimulate motivation, ensuring that children develop self-sustaining…