Background: STEAM education emphasizes transdisciplinary application and practice; however, there is a lack of comprehensive assessment tools for evaluating K-12 students' transdisciplinary learning. Given the cross-domain instructional and learning approaches in STEAM education, this study aims to develop and validate the Learn, Use, Practice,…

Considerable literature is devoted to teachers' assessment use to support teaching and learning. The study examined the factor structure of a measure of teachers' assessment use along the assessments "of", "for", and "as" learning purpose dimensions. The study also examined the factor structure of teachers' perceived…

Those asked to make valid decisions with data don't have the technical knowledge to understand nuance around data quality, assessment aims, and statistical limitations that influence how they should interpret the data. This reality is what Greg Thompson, Leslie Rutkowski, and David Rutkowski call the validity paradox. Educators can surmount this…

This report describes the authors' findings from a scoping literature review on the topic of instructional system coherence. The authors reviewed 77 pieces on coherence published from 1990 to 2023, including articles, reports, books, dissertations, and conference papers. The scope and definition of alignment and coherence have seemed to expand…

Ohio Revised Code 3302.038 requires the Department of Education and Workforce ("the Department") to submit a report regarding the effectiveness of the school district and building report cards by Dec. 31, 2024. The statute requires the Department to study data from the Ohio School Report Cards for the 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024…

For more than two decades, federal law has required states to identify schools failing to provide students with a high-quality education and has led to substantial debate about how best to do so. Appropriately identifying the lowest performing schools matters because it allows state and local education agencies to target limited resources for…

This is the appendices for the full report, "Identifying the Nation's Lowest Performing Schools: Shifts Following the Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)." This study examines state identification of schools for the most intensive support to see how changes in federal laws and regulations played out nationally and at the…

Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that…

In this paper we report our development of instruments to measure Big Ideas in school mathematics. In tackling the issue of assessment fatigue among students, we present an aggregated approach to measure students' knowledge of Big Ideas.

Many technical, test design, and implementation questions are involved in designing new statewide assessments. These are all critical, shaping often underexamined aspects of testing: student test experience and families' perceptions of testing in this new structure. Although the state outreach to students and families is needed generally, it is…

The Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) accredits all public schools in the state through the Kansas Education System of Accreditation (KESA). KESA is designed to evaluate at a system level, meaning school districts, a system of schools, or an independent school not affiliated with a school district. District leaders have been frustrated…

This report summarizes an investigation of literature published in 1985-2023 on universal design (UD) of large-scale assessments. State education agencies, K-12 assessment vendors, teacher trainers, and classroom teachers are increasingly applying the principles of UD to the instruction and assessment of students from special populations. In…

This presentation shares preliminary results from a literature scoping review to identify how the concept of Universal Design (UD) has been applied to district and large-scale academic assessments in the U.S. Guiding research questions were: (1) How has the concept of UD been described and applied to K-12 large-scale academic assessments? And (2)…

Using a literacy framework, this case study explores parents' assessment literacy in South Florida (United States). Data were collected using focus-group interviews of public-school parents (N = 32) and a document artifact. Findings illustrate how parents drew upon verbal and virtual information and social interactions to learn about the…

This handbook updates the general descriptions for the indicators of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program (PCEIP) as new sets of tables are released. It is a reference document that gives readers a broad understanding of each indicator, rather than the very specific methodological descriptions that would be necessary to reproduce the…