This Center for American Progress report examines whether states' adoption of standards-based policies predicts low-income students' NAEP achievement trends in fourth and eighth grade math and reading throughout the 2003-2013 decade. The report claims to analyze changes across five separate two-year intervals, but it only reports findings for…

There are many situations where random assignment of participants to treatment and comparison conditions may be unethical or impractical. This article provides an overview of propensity score techniques that can be used for estimating treatment effects in nonrandomized quasi-experimental studies. After reviewing the logic of propensity score…

The 2011 NAEP-TIMSS linking study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was designed to predict Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) scores for the U.S. states that participated in 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics and science assessment of eighth-grade students.…

The literature on validity provides much more guidance on how to collect various kinds of validity evidence than it does on which kinds of evidence to collect in specific cases. An argument-based approach to validation redresses the balance by linking the kinds of evidence needed to validate a test-score interpretation to the details of the…

This study explores extent to which postgraduate students are able to learn from holist and serialist learning materials and extent to which such competence is predictable by questionnaires. Results indicate 2 of 26 students scored equally well on holist and serialist competence tests, and such competence is predictable from questionnaires. (MBR)