ACT requested assistance from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (Center for Assessment) to investigate declines of scores for states administering the ACT to its 11th grade students in 2018. This request emerged from conversations among state leaders, the Center for Assessment, and ACT in trying to understand the…

Despite Supreme Court cases which have upheld the 1978 Bakke ruling, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering challenging colleges that consider race as a factor in admissions. As colleges and universities prepare to return to the fray in response to the most recent surfacing of this issue, One might ask if everything possible is being done…

Professional standards for educational testing recommend that both the overall standard error of measurement and the conditional standard error of measurement (CSEM) be computed on the score scale used to report scores to examinees. Several methods have been developed to compute scale score CSEMs. This paper compares three methods, based on…

This brief presents a review of research and current state practices as they relate to measures that Iowa might consider for its federal accountability indicator of school quality or student success--specifically, for inclusion within a composite index of postsecondary readiness. Section 1 of this brief introduces a framework for evaluating and…

A review of 13 years of research into antecedents of university students' grade point average (GPA) scores generated the following: a comprehensive, conceptual map of known correlates of tertiary GPA; assessment of the magnitude of average, weighted correlations with GPA; and tests of multivariate models of GPA correlates within and across…

At Southern Vermont College (SVC) and at the nation's other colleges and universities, Anatomy and Physiology I (A&PI) is the gateway course into healthcare careers. Disturbingly, at SVC and elsewhere, many first-year students interested in healthcare careers do not succeed in this course. They withdraw from the course or the institution, or…

This paper analyzes the influence of three different learning paradigms for learning literacy--formalist, cognitive-processing, and literacy practices--on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. It argues that the Common Core State Standards are based largely on a formalist paradigm as evident in the emphasis on teaching text…

After surveying 1,827 students in their final year at eighty randomly selected two-year and four-year public and private institutions, American Institutes for Research (2006) reported that approximately 30 percent of students in two-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in four-year institutions have only basic quantitative…

Considers what a responsible test developer would do to gain information to support the consequential basis of validity for a test early in the development. How the consequential basis of validity of the program would be monitored and reported during the life of the program is examined. The validity of the ACT Assessment is considered as if it…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how and why Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) has developed a system aiming to effectively place students in freshman and developmental English programs. The placement system includes: triangulating data from external test scores, with scores from a panel-marked hand-written essay (HWE),…

The effects of anchor test characteristics in the accuracy and precision of test equating in the "common items, nonequivalent groups design" were studied. The study also considered the effects of nonparallel based and new forms on the equating solution, and it investigated the effects of differential weighting on the success of equating…

The author examines four common myths that still influence individuals regarding their perspective and understanding of the role homeschooling plays in the education of American children. Myth 1 is that homeschooling produces social misfits, stemming from the belief that homeschooled students lack the socialization skills necessary for normal…

This report summarizes evaluation results on the costs and benefits of administering ACT's EXPLORE assessment in AISD during its pilot year in 2000-2001.