Background/Context: Two key uses of international assessments of achievement have been (a) comparing country performances for identifying the countries with the best education systems and (2) generating insights about effective policy and practice strategies that are associated with higher learning outcomes. Do country rankings really reflect the…

This paper is meant to highlight the occurrence of Simpson's Paradox when using aggregated data obtained from two IEA studies in Israel, while ignoring the effect of a powerful intervening variable in the local context--the ethnicity factor. It will demonstrate faulty conclusions regarding either the absence of relationships between a contextual…

The debate about the performance of US students on international assessments of educational achievement routinely fails to account for one consistently stark result: US achievement is bifurcated between a group of high-performing Asian and white students and an exceptionally low-performing group of black and Hispanic students. By summarizing…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University conducted a large-scale analysis of the impact of charter schools on student performance. The center's data covered 65-70% of the nation's charter schools. Although results varied by state, 17% of the charter school students have significantly higher math results than …

The Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) project is a longitudinal study of student learning from two types of mathematics curricula: integrated and subject-specific. Previous large-scale research studies such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that numerous variables are…

"How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement" estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school and investigates the characteristics of charter schools associated with the most positive effects on achievement. Because the report relies on an…

This paper examines the current academic and policy literatures concerning school evaluation in primary and secondary education within the OECD countries. First, it provides a typology of the existing systems of school evaluation across the OECD. It encompasses the diverse criteria and instruments commonly used to carry out schools evaluation, as…

Addresses the problem of how academic value can be determined. Reviews several sample situations involving judgments of the merits of teachers, graduate assistants, and undergraduate writers. Proposes a system of "value-sorting," which requires that competing entities be measured in relationship to each other rather than against some abstract…

This study examines the appropriateness of a large-scale state standards-based English-Language Arts (ELA) assessment for students who are deaf or hard of hearing by comparing the internal test structures for these students to students without disabilities. The Grade 4 and 8 ELA assessments were analyzed via a series of parcel-level exploratory…

Survey items representing 30 standards of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation were used to examine violations in program evaluations. Twenty-nine novice graduate students, 57 graduate students with moderate knowledge about evaluation, and 61 expert evaluators viewed propriety and accuracy standards as suffering the most…

Mounting pressure in the policy arena to improve teacher productivity either by improving signals that predict teacher performance or through creating incentive contracts based on performance--has spurred two related questions: Are there important determinants of teacher productivity that are not captured by teacher credentials but that can be…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

Suggestions, based on the experience of researchers at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) Associated Universities (ORAU), are offered on how evaluations in which true experimental designs are not possible can be designed for meaningful comparison. The ORAU conducts evaluation and assessment studies of educational programs intended to explore some aspect of the…