Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that…

Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that…

Of critical importance to education policy is monitoring trends in education outcomes over time. In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has provided long-term trend data since 1970; at the state/jurisdiction level, NAEP has provided long-term trend data since 1996. In addition to the national NAEP, all 50…

We propose a method of generating teaching policies for use in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) for concept learning tasks [1], e.g., teaching students the meanings of words by showing images that exemplify their meanings à la Rosetta Stone [2] and Duo Lingo [3]. The approach is grounded in control theory and capitalizes on recent work by [4],…

This paper provides a history of ETS's role in developing assessment instruments and psychometric procedures for measuring change in large-scale national assessments funded by the Longitudinal Studies branch of the National Center for Education Statistics. It documents the innovations developed during more than 30 years of working with…