Testlets, or groups of related items, are commonly included in educational assessments due to their many logistical and conceptual advantages. Despite their advantages, testlets introduce complications into the theory and practice of educational measurement. Responses to items within a testlet tend to be correlated even after controlling for…

The purpose of this paper is to open the methods, construction and assumptions of a new performance benchmark to examination, critique, and improvement by technical experts. The paper begins with known technical questions about this new benchmark. In includes suggestions made by technical advisors. It then details the construction of the…

Teachers devote a substantial amount of their time to assessment-related activities. This study aimed to describe beginning teachers' assessment literacy and to examine a structural model that binds assessment literacy with assessment training, self-efficacy, and conceptions of assessment. Data were collected from 327 Israeli inductee teachers and…

In light of the emergence of statistical analysis techniques based on data mining in education sciences, and the potential they offer to detect non-trivial information in large databases, this paper presents a procedure used to detect factors linked to academic achievement in large-scale assessments. The study is based on a non-experimental,…

Prior research has shown that there is a correlation between teacher characteristics (e.g., pedagogical knowledge, teacher preparation/certification) and student achievement. Current political contexts call for the utilization of student achievement data to measure the effectiveness of our education systems. A solid research base of how teacher…

This study examined student achievement in Michigan public school districts to determine if rural school districts are demonstrating greater financial efficiency by producing higher levels of student achievement than school districts in other geographic locations with similar socioeconomics. Three models were developed using multiple regression…

Findings from this study show that educational and mobility opportunities for families and students participating in the Chilean voucher system are not homogenously distributed. Some families and students use and benefit from the system, while others will remain marginalized. The quantitative results in this study demonstrate that students of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure and compare the performance of Portuguese secondary schools. Design/methodology/approach: Some data on the schools were collected via an electronic questionnaire sent to 103 secondary schools of the centre region of Portugal; other needed data were available through the Centre Regional Education…

In an era of increased accountability and challenging times for public finance, charter schools built on decentralization, grassroots accountability, and market forces may provide, in the spirit of "educational laboratories," lessons for increasing student achievement more efficiently through diverse and innovative management,…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

This study examined the relationship of two climate constructs in academic optimism and organizational climate as each relates to school effectiveness. Academic optimism is an academic environment comprised of three dimensions: academic emphasis, collective efficacy, and faculty trust (Hoy, Tarter, & Hoy, 2006). The Organizational Climate…

This paper uses a new data-set for cumulative national investment in formal schooling and a new instrument for schooling to estimate the national return on investment in 61 countries. These estimates are combined with data on the private rate of return on investment in schooling to estimate the external rate of return. In 1990 the external rate of…

This article develops a model for longitudinal student achievement data designed to estimate heterogeneity in teacher effects across students of different achievement levels. The model specifies interactions between teacher effects and students' predicted scores on a test, estimating both average effects of individual teachers and interaction…

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This article quantifies…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…