High-quality assessments are crucial to many aspects of the educational process. They can help policymakers monitor long-term educational trends, assist state educational agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) in allocating resources and professional development opportunities, provide insights to teachers about how well students…

Assessments come in many forms in part because they serve many purposes, and those purposes often vary by the stakeholders they support. Students, parents, teachers, and school, district and state leaders may all be end users of the information provided by various assessments. This brief supports state leaders' understanding of assessments by…

Employers, postsecondary institutions, and civic leaders are urging greater focus on 21st century skills essential for college, career, and civic success: problem solving, interpersonal skills, and collaboration, among others. In response to these demands, states across the country are working to realign policies--on learning standards,…

Intended for administrators and policymakers as well as teachers, this digest explores approaches to, problems with, and trends in large scale writing assessment. The digest first compares direct and indirect assessment approaches, then examines three approaches to scoring: holistic, primary trait, and analytic. It then discusses issues and…

This document contains the executive summary and the detailed report which provide an independent evaluation of Kentucky's new system for assessing student performance, the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System (KIRIS). The summary gauges progress to date, highlights some strengths to be built on and problems to be solved, and provides…

The results of an evaluation of Vermont's statewide assessment initiative are presented, with information about the implementation of the program, its effects on educational practice, the analytic challenge presented by the portfolio scoring process, the reliability and validity of portfolio scores, and the tensions between assessment and…

Accuracy in the scoring of writing is critical if standardized tasks are to be used in a national assessment scheme. Three approaches to establishing accuracy (i.e., consensus, consistency, and measurement) exist and commonly large-scale assessment programs of primary school writing demonstrate adjacent agreement consensus rates of between 80% and…

This is the sixth and final report of the National Research Council's Committee on the Performance of Military Personnel on the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM) Project, a project designed to develop measures of performance for entry-level military jobs so that enlistment standards could be linked to performance…