While there is consensus that institutions need to represent their educational effectiveness through documentation of student learning, the higher education community is divided between those who support national standardized tests to compare institutions' educational effectiveness, and those who believe that valid assessment of student…

In "Beyond Test Scores: Leading Indicators for Education," Foley and colleagues (2008) define leading indicators as those that "provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement" (p. 1) and stress that educators "need leading indicators to help them see the direction their efforts are going in and to take…

Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 has made significant changes in how all students are assessed. Because scores on state and district tests have important implications for students, parents, and school personnel, teachers and students should approach testing with…

P. R. Killeen's (2005a) probability of replication ("p[subscript rep]") of an experimental result is the fiducial Bayesian predictive probability of finding a same-sign effect in a replication of an experiment. "p[subscript rep]" is now routinely reported in "Psychological Science" and has also begun to appear in…

Infants' auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test…

Collaborative exams, with subsections in which students have an opportunity to work with each other, are not yet widely used in introductory geoscience courses. This type of exam structure, with other participatory teaching strategies, was employed in two different courses, and results were found to provide a sensitive and revealing tool for…

Three experiments identified factors that did and did not enhance the formation of two-node four-member equivalence classes when training and testing were conducted with trials presented in a trace stimulus pairing two-response (SP2R) format. All trials contained two separately presented stimuli. Half of the trials, called within-class trials,…

Academic writing and education in foreign and second languages both have lengthy histories. Their histories have diverged but also intersected. Matsuda (2005), for example, described the convergence in policies that led to a distinctive discipline of "L2 writing" in higher education in the U.S.A. during the latter part of the 20th century.…

In this commentary, the author points out few issues, one being that there are models mislabeled as diagnostic, which deal with linear decompositions of item difficulties rather than estimating multidimensional skill variables. The author discusses the issue that there are many new names for essentially well-known models for multiple simultaneous…

Trial-to-trial variation in word-pronunciation times exhibits 1/f scaling. One explanation is that human performances are consequent on multiplicative interactions among interdependent processes-interaction dominant dynamics. This article describes simulated distributions of pronunciation times in a further test for multiplicative interactions and…

Since researchers acknowledged the several advantages of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) over traditional linear test administration, the issue of item exposure control has received increased attention. Due to CAT's underlying philosophy, particular items in the item pool may be presented too often and become overexposed, while other items are…

This report presents the value-added models that will be used to measure school and teacher effectiveness in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) in the 2010-2011 school year. It updates the earlier technical report, "Measuring Value Added for IMPACT and TEAM in DC Public Schools." The earlier report described the methods used…

This chapter addresses different modalities of assessment, provides an overview of the assessment processes of the basic skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) tested by the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) examination, and explores the ways in which the FCE Online Course and Tester--the resources provided through the…

Quality assurance in instructional development demands an exhaustive formative evaluation effort and applied testing. Unfortunately, this process is expensive and requires large numbers of user testers with characteristics similar to the intended audience. This article presents a procedure for increasing the efficiency of quality assurance efforts…

Within the context of standards-based educational systems, states are using large scale reading assessments to help ensure that all children have the opportunity to learn essential knowledge and skills. The challenge for developers of accessible reading assessments is to develop assessments that measure only those student characteristics that are…