Recent years have produced a surge in interest in improving state assessment programs. Many states are designing new assessments. Much of this innovation is aimed at addressing longstanding areas of unhappiness with typical domain-sampled, end-of-year state assessments: States want to streamline assessment activities, enhance the instructional…

Great opportunities for language testing practitioners are enabled through language program administration. Local language tests lend themselves to multiple purposes--for placement and diagnosis, as a means of tracking progress, and as a contribution to program evaluation and revision. Administrative choices, especially those involving a test, are…

This document is written primarily for policy makers and state department of education staff who are considering through-year assessments, as well as consultants and contractors state departments rely on. The document identifies essential things to consider when designing or evaluating a through-year assessment program. The paper is organized into…

The emergence of 21st-century skills convinced educational institutions in modifying teaching styles, which lead to the introduction of blended, flipped, and personalized learning. Studies demonstrated present-day best practices, but none provided a practical assessment procedure. Thus, this study aimed to develop a tool in evaluating learning…

The "Program Administration Scale" (PAS) is designed to reliably measure and improve the leadership and management practices of center-based programs--the only instrument of its kind to focus exclusively on organization-wide administrative issues. In the third edition, the authors share updated information supporting the reliability and…

Evaluation data is needed to demonstrate the impact of 4-H science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programming on children and youth. However, collecting evaluation data from cloverbuds (ages 5-7) is particularly challenging given their developmental age. We adapted an observational Cloverbud evaluation tool to measure basic life…

Nationwide, over half a million children live in households that report very low food security among children, meaning a child is not eating enough, going hungry, skipping a meal, or not eating for a full day because the household can't afford food. School meals fill an important gap in meeting household food demand during the week but cannot meet…

Programmatic assessment is both a philosophy and a method for assessment. It has been developed in medical education as a response to the limitation of the dominant testing or measurement approaches and to better align with changes in how medical competence was conceptualised. It is based on continual collection of assessment and feedback…

In summer 2013, Manhattan College introduced an online summer "bridge to calculus" course for incoming first-year students in science, engineering, and mathematics education who marginally did not receive a calculus recommendation based on a mathematics placement test. In this paper, we describe the development of the bridge course and…

Empirical growth benchmarks, as introduced by Hill, Bloom, Black, and Lipsey (2008), are a well-known way to contextualize effect sizes in education research. Past work on these benchmarks, both positive and negative, has largely avoided confronting the role of vertical scales, yet technical issues with vertical scales trouble the use of such…

Education officials have long hoped that the statewide academic assessments most students take each year could be used not only for accountability but also to guide instruction. Congress established the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program in 2015 to help address this goal, offering up to seven states flexibility from…

This article provides an overview and evaluation of the uses--actual and potential--of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken dialogue systems (SDS), related technologies that can be applied to second language speaking assessment, given particular definitions of the construct. Both technologies have only gradually moved in the direction of…

This article details the experiences of four teacher education faculty members as we navigated the consequential implementation of a state-mandated high stakes teacher performance assessment in our educator preparation program. By shifting our perspective from simply complying with an assessment mandate to considering how we can leverage…

Like instruments used in afterschool programs to assess children's social and emotional growth or to evaluate staff members' performance, instruments used to evaluate program quality should be free from bias. Practitioners and researchers alike want to know that assessment instruments, whatever their type or intent, treat all people fairly and do…

This report describes the School Turnaround AmeriCorps Initiative and the program's impact on students at Reagan High School and Travis High School during the 2015-2016 school year.