Many quality assurance systems rely on high-stakes assessment for course certification. Such methods are not as objective as they might appear; they can have detrimental effects on student motivation and may lack relevance to the needs of degree courses increasingly oriented to vocational utility. "Alternative assessment" methods can…

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the edTPA, a performance assessment created by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) and administered by Pearson, Inc., to assess the professional readiness of student teachers. We challenge claims made in support of using this assessment, specifically within the…

The authors encourage those in the field of school psychology to consider the use of learning disabilities assessment practices in relation to specific American Psychological Association and National Association of School Psychologists ethical codes and in regard to the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association,…

Better teacher evaluation should lead to better instruction and improved outcomes for students, but more accurate classification of teachers requires better information than is now available. Because existing measures of performance are incomplete and imperfect, measured performance does not always reflect true performance. Teachers who are truly…

The literature on bibliometric indices for assessing scholarly impact, in particular the "h" index (Hirsch, 2005) and its many variants, is extensive, but nevertheless Ruscio and colleagues (this issue) succeed in making a valuable contribution. They have made the effort of collecting publication and citation data for no less than 1,750…

In this report the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution presents the results of a self-developed Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) along with an interactive application that grades large school districts according to the ECCI. The index is composed of 13 pro choice criteria. The authors present the ECCI as a…

This brief considers the problem of using value-added scores to compare teachers who work in different schools. The author focuses on whether such comparisons can be regarded as fair, or, in statistical language, "unbiased." An unbiased measure does not systematically favor teachers because of the backgrounds of the students they are…

This brief (1) defines indicators, (2) places the concept into the context of the various ways indicators can be used in education, (3) explores some specific considerations and concerns that arise in evaluating results, (4) offers a categorization and examples of short-term outcome indicators for school use, and (5) stresses the need for policy…

Using computers to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is more difficult than it seems. Value-added modeling is a genuinely serious attempt to grapple with the difficulties. Value-added modeling carries the promise of measuring teacher quality automatically and objectively, and improving school systems at minimal cost. The essence of…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

Lecoutre, Lecoutre, and Poitevineau (2010) have provided sophisticated grounding for "p[subscript rep]." Computing it precisely appears, fortunately, no more difficult than doing so approximately. Their analysis will help move predictive inference into the mainstream. Iverson, Wagenmakers, and Lee (2010) have also validated…

This study explores No Child Left Behind's required timetable for English language learners (ELLs) to reach English language proficiency within five years, as outlined in the Annual Measurable Achievement Outcomes (AMAOs), despite the lack of research evidence to support this as a reasonable expectation. Analysis was conducted on the archived data…

Placement exams are high-stakes assessments that determine many students' college trajectories. More than half of entering students at community colleges are placed into developmental education in at least one subject, based primarily on scores from these assessments, yet recent research fails to find evidence that placement into remediation…

Schools and school systems throughout the nation are increasingly experimenting with using various instructional technologies to improve productivity and decrease costs, but evidence on both the effectiveness and the costs of education technology is limited. A recent report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sets out to describe "the…

To conduct evaluations that can benefit individual programs as well as the field as a whole, environmental educators must have the necessary evaluation competencies. This exploratory study was conducted to determine to what extent a self-directed learning resource entitled "My Environmental Education Evaluation Resource Assistant" (MEERA) can…