In the US K-12 public school settings, each state's annual English language proficiency (ELP) assessment, as part of an educational accountability system, has tremendous impact on English learner (EL) students' academic paths and success. It is thus critical to establish a robust validation framework and empirical evidence to ensure that states'…

Possible threats to the validity of North Carolina's accountability model used to predict academic growth were investigated in two ways: the state's regression equations were replicated but updated to utilize current testing data and not that from years past as in the state's current model; and the updated equations were expanded to include…

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test was the major source of data for the Texas educational accountability system from 1994 through 2002. Contrary to critics who claim that TAAS data are invalid and unreliable measures of student performance, structural equation analyses of TAAS reading data based on the 1994 Texas third grade…

In this chapter, the authors focus on issues of validity in measuring student learning as a prospective indicator of institutional effectiveness. Other chapters in this volume include reference to specific approaches to measuring student learning for accountability purposes, such as through standardized tests, authentic samples of student work,…

The purpose of this study was to validate the Louisiana SAM Instructional Staff Questionnaire, a key component of the Louisiana School Analysis Model. The model was designed as a comprehensive evaluation tool for schools. Principle axis factoring with oblique rotation was used to uncover the underlying structure of the SISQ. (Contains 1 table.)

This article examines major threats to the validity of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in the context of rural schools. Although rural students and their schools made significant academic progress in the past on national and state assessments, the current goal of AYP turns out to be highly unrealistic for them unless states set far lower…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

Longitudinal, student performance-based, value-added accountability models have become popular of late and continue to enjoy increasing popularity. Such models require student data to be vertically scaled across wide grade and developmental ranges so that the value added to student growth/achievement by teachers, schools, and districts may be…