The present qualitative action research study was conducted to gain further understanding of administrator and teacher perceptions about grading systems in elementary schools, administrators' and teachers' ability to ensure consistent and fair practices and any correlation that grades may have to students' social, emotional, and/or academic…

A person's literacy level impacts multitudinous aspects of their life. Determining and implementing effective procedures to address reading struggles continues to plague the education sector. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how teachers in the fourth grade describe how they select and implement reading intervention…

In many countries, assessment and curriculum reforms came into being in recent decades. In Iran, an important educational assessment reform took place called Descriptive Assessment (DA). In this reform, the focus of student assessment was moved from a more summative approach of providing grades and deciding about promotion to the next grade to a…

High-quality measurement tools are critical to school improvement efforts. Education researchers frequently employ surveys in order to assess a host of variables associated with school improvement. This article asserts that Rasch modeling techniques enhance the quality of a measurement tool because they comprise elements of both qualitative and…

This applied dissertation was designed to provide perceptual teacher data as well as summative testing data to educational leaders concerning the effects of implementing Investigations in Number, Data, and Space® (Investigations) in three Title I elementary school settings, two Title I schools, and one non-Title I school. Data collected during…

This action research study was conducted in an elementary school with a team of seven fourth- grade teachers. Transcripts of the fourth-grade teachers' discussions during their common planning sessions were recorded and analyzed. The data revealed that during collaborative planning sessions the teachers repeatedly referred to authentic…

The Berge et al. article in this volume presents the functional construct of writing that underlies summative and formative assessment of writing as a key competency in Norway. A functional construct implies that specific acts of writing and their purposes constrain what is a relevant selection among the semiotic resources that writing generally…

The purpose of the present study was to examine validity aspects of teachers' judgements of pupils' reading skills. Data come from Sweden's participation in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001, for Grades 3 and 4. For pupils at the same achievement levels, as measured by PIRLS 2001 test, teachers' judgements of…

This study investigated the degree to which teacher developed curriculum was aligned with the national standards in Qatar. Three sources of data included teacher response to a questionnaire, teacher interviews and expert rating of the alignment of teacher-developed materials with curriculum standards. A survey and interview questions measured…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to describe the perceptions of elementary teachers from an urban school district in Southern California regarding their inquiry-based science instructional practices, assessment methods and professional development. The district's inquiry professional development called the California Mathematics and…

Constant changes in legislation regarding monitoring student achievement levels have led schools to redevelop usage of instructional time in several core subjects. Legislation such as Missouri Senate Bill 319 specifically mandates that the school must intervene if a student is not reading at the appropriate level by grade four. Alternative…

This paper reports the results of a descriptive study on the use of a technology-enhanced formative assessment system called Accelerated Math (AM) for ELLs and their native-English-speaking (NES) peers. It was comprised of analyses of an extant database of 18,549 students, including 2,057 ELLs, from grades 1 through 8 across 30 U.S. states. These…

Based on data from a sample of 106 students in grades 2 through 8, we explored the psychometric integrity of the Universal Academic, Cognitive, Creativity, Emotion Screening Scale (Universal ACCESS; R. S. McCallum & B. A. Bracken, in press). We obtained Cronbach's alphas ranging from 0.95 to 0.98 across the eight scales of the Universal…

This paper provides observations of physical fitness testing in Texas schools and physical education teachers' insights about large-scale testing using the FITNESSGRAM[R] assessment (Cooper Institute, 2007) as mandated by Texas Senate Bill 530. In the first study, undergraduate and graduate students who were trained to observe and assess student…

This study explored the relationships among the components of the Arizona Department of Education's new teacher evaluation model, with a particular focus on the extent to which ratings from the state model's teacher observation instrument differentiated higher and lower performance. The study used teacher-level evaluation data collected by the…