K-12 gifted and talented programs have struggled with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, native language, and disability inequity since their inception. This inequity has been well documented in public schools since at least the 1970s and has been stubbornly persistent despite receiving substantial attention at conferences, in scholarly journals, and…

The racial achievement gap is one of the most persistent and pervasive issues in educational research. Unfortunately, the current research on Black student achievement lacks empirical studies that address the academic strengths and challenges facing Black girls. Specifically, there is a dearth of resources in the form of books, articles, and…

Career and technical educators have a critical role to play in addressing occupational segregation. The gender equity provisions that are an important part of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins V) can help open doors for more women and girls to pursue more equitable pathways to the good jobs generated by…

Many large-scale educational surveys have moved from linear form design to multistage testing (MST) design. One advantage of MST is that it can provide more accurate latent trait [theta] estimates using fewer items than required by linear tests. However, MST generates incomplete response data by design; hence, questions remain as to how to…

According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the U.S. educational system has consistently failed Black and Brown children across both reading and mathematics. Educational research has further uncovered the ways that reading and mathematics assessment and curriculum are often biased and culturally and…

Constructed response (CR) items are widely used in large-scale testing programs, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and many district and state-level assessments in the United States. One unique feature of CR items is that they depend on human raters to assess the quality of examinees' work. The judgment of human…

The literacy faculty at a regional, comprehensive university in the southeastern U.S. explored the perceptions of students in their undergraduate and graduate literacy programs--as well as students in contiguous, supported programs--regarding the achievement gaps between Latinx and bi/multilingual students and their White, English-dominant peers.…

When judging subject-specific aspects of students' texts, teachers should assess various characteristics, e.g., spelling and content, independently of one another since these characteristics are indicators of different skills. Independent judgments enable teachers to adapt their classroom instruction according to students' skills. It is still…

Arizona has played a large part in the development and implementation of policy that directly inhibits equity of opportunity for the English learner (EL) population, the largest and most damaging of which came out of legislation passed due to the "Flores v. Arizona" case which concluded in 2015. This research article seeks to critically…

The purpose of this APA BEA Racial Disparities Task Force report is to examine the role of racism and bias on educational opportunity and achievement disparities experienced by children. Specifically, we seek to link racism explicitly to opportunity gaps by examining how racism operates on multiple levels. Using critical race theory,…

This article promotes the use of modern test theory in testing situations where sum scores for binary responses are now used. It directly compares the efficiencies and biases of classical and modern test analyses and finds an improvement in the root mean squared error of ability estimates of about 5% for two designed multiple-choice tests and…

A latent multivariate regression model is developed that employs a generalized asymmetric Laplace (GAL) prior distribution for regression coefficients. The model is designed for high-dimensional applications where an approximate sparsity condition is satisfied, such that many regression coefficients are near zero after accounting for all the model…

The multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models with covariates proposed by Haberman and implemented in the "mirt" program provide a flexible way to analyze data based on item response theory. In this report, we discuss applications of the MIRT models with covariates to longitudinal test data to measure skill differences at the…

Economists often use test scores to measure a student's performance or an adult's human capital. These scores reflect non-trivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For example, the scores computed in several major testing regimes, including the National Assessment of…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Statewide Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving…