What do students learn in school? In the 21 century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer. The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? Most student…

Massive online user review platforms, with their star ratings and text reviews, are reshaping the information available for consumer and public service decisions. We study the leading K-12 schooling platform, GreatSchools, applying machine learning (Natural Language Processing, NLP) to 600,000 reviews that encompass the vast majority of the…

The U.S. Department of Education (Education) plays a key role in supporting educational opportunities for K-12 students, including awarding grants and overseeing compliance with federal education laws. Over the past decade, Education's grant awards have generally increased in number and size. Using Education budget data, it was determined that in…

When presenting results from rigorous, field-based evaluations of educational interventions, researchers often reveal methodological barriers they face in designing studies to assessing program effectiveness. The evaluations funded by the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) present a timely opportunity for identifying relevant and pressing issues…

Self-assessment practices have been advocated in recent Irish educational documents due to their potential to enhance school children's learning and self-regulatory skills. However, the literature has highlighted how some children struggle to make accurate self-assessments of their academic work, which diminishes such positive effects (Keane and…

Value-added "Progress" measures are to be introduced for all English schools in 2016 as "headline" measures of school performance. This move comes despite research highlighting high levels of instability in value-added measures and concerns about the omission of contextual variables in the planned measure. This article studies…

This report describes the implementation of professional development (PD) reforms and efforts to use teacher effectiveness (TE) data to inform PD through the third year of the initiative for all seven sites: Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), Shelby County Schools (SCS, formerly Memphis City Schools), Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), and…

The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) requires faculty from educator preparation programs to provide evidence of credential candidates' impact on K-12 student learning. However, there is a paucity of information on preparation programs' use of direct assessments of student learning to gauge credential candidate…

Background/Context: The target of assessment validation is not an assessment but the use of an assessment for a purpose. Although the validation literature often provides examples of assessment purposes, comprehensive reviews of these purposes are rare. Additionally, assessment purposes posed for validation are generally described as discrete and…

Principals and teachers do not use large-scale assessment results because the lack of distinct and reliable subtests prevents identifying strengths and weaknesses of students and instruction, the results arrive too late to be used, and principals and teachers need assistance to use the results to improve instruction so as to improve student…

This chapter addresses the psychometric challenges in assessing English language learners (ELLs) and students with disabilities (SWDs). The first section addresses some general considerations in the assessment of ELLs and SWDs, including the prevalence of ELLs and SWDs in the student population, federal and state legislation that requires the…

When lotteries are infeasible, researchers must rely on observational methods to estimate charter effectiveness at raising student test scores. Considerable attention has been paid to observational studies by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which have analyzed charter performance in 27 states. However, the…

This report, based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of school districts in Common Core-adopting states, examines school districts' efforts to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The report addresses district leaders' views on the rigor of the CCSS and their impact on learning and instruction, progress on and…

A hallmark of the US education system is the opportunity afforded to students to pursue education and career paths of their own choosing. This flexibility and autonomy, however, has drawbacks. Students must navigate a series of complex and often disconnected environments, as well as numerous decision points, before they attain a fulfilling career.…

Leaders in schools, districts, and states, along with policymakers in Washington, D.C., are focusing new energy on closing long-standing gaps in performance that separate low-income students and students of color from others. It's critically important that their efforts succeed--for students, their families, their communities, and for their…