The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is intended to assess all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to ensure equity and inclusion. This paper explores the extent to which equity and inclusion are achieved for students with disability through NAPLAN reporting. Document analysis of publicly accessible NAPLAN…

Large-scale learning assessments can be used to generate performance and contextual data on student learning outcomes. They can be national, regional, or international; school based or household based. The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has conducted a qualitative study to explore both how and why learning…

Although educators frequently use assessment to identify who needs supplemental instruction and if that instruction is working, there is a lack of research investigating assessment that informs what instruction students need. The purpose of the current study was to determine if a brief (approximately 20 min) task that reflects a common middle…

A recent qualitative study by a team of researchers looked into how grade-level teams of teachers are thinking about causes and strategies based on looking at student performance data. What is interesting in these findings is how infrequently teachers attribute student results to instruction -- just 15% of the time. Teachers in this study were…

Digital game-based assessments generate student process data that is much more difficult to analyze than traditional assessments. The formative nature of game-based assessments permits students, through applying and practicing the targeted knowledge and skills during gameplay, to gain experiences, receive immediate feedback, and as a result,…

Interest in 21st century skills has brought concomitant interest in ways to teach and measure them. Games hold promise in these areas, but much of their potential has yet to be proven, and there are few examples of how to use the rich data from games to make inferences about players' knowledge, skills, and attributes. This article builds an…

Students with significant cognitive disabilities present an assessment dilemma that centers on access and validity in large-scale testing programs. Typically, access is improved by eliminating construct-irrelevant barriers, while validity is improved, in part, through test standardization. In this article, one state's alternate assessment data…

The purpose of this mixed methods phenomenological study was to explore the data-driven instructional decisions that elementary teachers make in literacy. Educators have moved towards a culture of being data-driven, and have declared data use in schools to be significant to school improvement and accountability (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006).…

Archaeology provides the chance to ask questions about human culture, past and present, using artifacts as evidence. By studying archaeology, students learn about how people in their region found and prepared food, responded to changes in their environment (e.g., flooding, earthquakes, droughts), and interacted with other peoples. This article…

The purpose of the study is to determine what effects explicit and systematic math intervention instruction will have on student's performance on math assessments. The study will focus on a small group of fifth grade students that have been identified as needing targeted intervention (tier 2) and intensive interventions (tier 1) through the…

This quantitative study reviews the impact on student achievement following professional development on the principles of formative assessment. The study compared mathematics and reading performance data from student populations with teachers who received training in formative assessment to performance data from student populations with teachers…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one approach to teaching science that supports the notion that students construct knowledge within contextual settings, and that critical thinking and application are best fostered within these realistic contexts. In other words, learning activities are best applied when they are authentic or embedded in real-life…

The performance of a school system can be evaluated through the learning levels of the pupils, usually summarized by school mean scores. The variability of the mean scores among schools is rarely studied in detail, though it is a crucial issue especially in primary schools: in fact, a high variability among schools raises doubts on the capacity of…

In addition to collecting achievement data, international large-scale assessment programmes gather auxiliary information from students and schools regarding the context of teaching and learning. In an effort to clarify some of the opacity surrounding international large-scale assessment programmes and the potential problems associated with less…

This study is an action research based both on quantitative and qualitative research techniques carried out with a group of fifth grade students in K"r,ehir during the 2003-2004 education year. In the study, the main purpose was to improve historical time concept and chronology perceptions among fifth grade students. Students' interests, reactions…