A study examining the relationship between nonverbal intelligence and academic achievement in 53 hearing impaired 7-18 year olds supported using the Hickey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude (along with other measures) in interpreting individual differences in the academic achievement of hearing impaired students. (Author/CL)

This collection of essays focuses on educational testing, showing how testing encroaches on teacher freedom and how narrow standards can actually reduce student achievement. The chapters are: (1) Testing Is Not Teaching; (2) The Freedom Factor; (3) Sharing Power with Intelligent Expectation; (4) Everyone Has a Story To Tell; (5) Lets Change the…

Discusses factors which lead to the overuse of and overreliance on standardized tests in the United States. (MM)

Nine teachers from two schools rated third- through sixth-grade regular education students (n=97) using Teacher Rating of Academic Achievement Motivation (TRAAM) and Teacher Rating of Academic Performance. Initial analyses of TRAAM indicated the instrument has potential to become sound psychometric alternative assessment device for investigating…

The Adolescent Coping Scale (E. Frydenberg and R. Lewis, 1993) (ACS), developed in the Australian context, has been used widely since 1993 as an instrument to measure coping. Studies to date have published data highlighting the relationship between variables such as age, ethnicity, gender, attitudes and achievement, and coping. In doing so, they…

This study was undertaken to investigate educational practices at the school district level. Its purpose was to identify school districts in the United States that have discovered ways to ensure that students in all or most of their schools are making significant progress toward meeting high standards, and then to learn from their experiences.…

Building student abilities for taking standardized tests has certainly become an issue as testing has become increasingly important in the U.S. educational system. How much emphasis should a school or district place on educating students to do well on such tests? It is certainly possible to spend too much school time learning to take tests, and…

Issues involved in linking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to the proposed Voluntary National Tests (VNTs) are discussed. Linkage is used to refer to procedures intended to permit scores from two different tests that are designed to measure the same variable to be expressed on the same scale. There are substantial…

Studied 18 states with high-stakes testing to see if their programs were affecting student learning, analyzing results from additional tests covering some of the same domain as each state's own test. Findings suggest that in all but one case, student learning is indeterminate, remains at the same level, or actually decreases with the…

Good reforms can have harmful results if equity effects are ignored. As California implements its accountability system, certain questions must be addressed concerning the system's data use, measurement features (consistency, meaningfulness, achievement growth, achievement gaps among groups), instructional improvement focus, incentives for…

This study examined two major questions: do national and state assessments provide consistent information on the performance of state education systems, and what accounts for discrepancies between national and state assessment results if they are found? Data came from national and state assessments in grade 4 and grade 8 mathematics from 1992 to…

Most stakeholders in higher education are deeply interested in improving student learning outcomes, but there is disagreement about whether standardized testing programs will contribute to this goal. Plans for standardized testing of college students in public institutions appear to be on the rise. Eight to 10 states currently engage in…

This study asserts that central examinations need not necessarily be those administered by the government; they can be examinations centralized at some administrative level, but in any case, they are external to the school. This study also assessed the impact of central examinations on the functioning of the education system and students academic…

The purpose of this study was to equate two standardized English as a Second Language (ESL) proficiency tests, the New York State Placement Test (NYSPT) and the Combined English Language Skills Assessment (CELSA), with the Mainstream English Language Training (MELT) project Student Performance Levels (SPLs) in order to facilitate the reporting of…

The Student-Problem (S-P) methodology is described using an example of 24 students on a test of 44 items. Information based on the students' test score and the modified caution index is put to diagnostic use. A modification of the S-P methodology is applied to domain-referenced testing. (Author/CM)