"The Complete Learning Disabilities Resource Guide" (formerly "The Complete Learning Disabilities Directory") has been a comprehensive and sought-after resource for professionals, families and individuals with learning disabilities since 1992. This twenty-second edition is the most comprehensive and current source of resources…

Most students with disabilities participate in state assessments with or without accommodations [based on each student's Individualized Education Program (IEP)]. A small number of students with the most severe or profound intellectual disabilities participate in an alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS). Until…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, large-scale assessments have come to play a central role in federal and state education accountability systems. Teachers and parents have expressed a number of concerns about their state testing programs, such as too much time devoted to testing and the high-stakes use of testing for teacher evaluation.…

Test security has increased in importance in the last few years given high-profile cases of educator misconduct. This paper provides a review of state test security statutes and regulations related to statewide achievement testing using as a framework recent best practices reports by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education…

This article proposes that sampling design effects have potentially huge unrecognized impacts on the results reported by large-scale district and state assessments in the United States. When design effects are unrecognized and unaccounted for they lead to underestimating the sampling error in item and test statistics. Underestimating the sampling…

Testing and data integrity on statewide assessments is defined as the establishment of a comprehensive set of policies and procedures for: (1) the proper preparation of students; (2) the management and administration of the test(s) that will lead to accurate and appropriate reporting of assessment results; and (3) maintaining the security of…

Nevada statutes and administrative regulations specifically prohibit the disclosure of the content of examinations used in the Nevada Proficiency Examination Program. This document focuses on procedures to insure examination security. The state's test security requirements are outlined. Other sections deal with access to and copying of examination…

In state assessment programs in which performance has no real immediate consequence for the individual examinee, the issue of examinee motivation arises. Some examinees may respond to questions in ways that do not reflect their real knowledge of the test domain. In this study, a new approach was developed to identify students who have responded to…

This handbook is developed as a part of Maryland's accountability program and is intended to assure the required uniformity in test administration procedures, security of test materials, and other matters with the aim of establishing an accountability assessment system which is fair to students, staff, schools, and school systems. Special…

That teachers should be held accountable for conducting the best possible instructional processes, not for guaranteeing learning, is the view of the National Education Association (NEA). Because of the inadequate nature of tests of student achievement, the diverse nature of student populations, and the various conditions affecting learning, the…

The Wisconsin legislature has required the Department of Public Instruction to adopt or approve standardized tests for statewide use to measure student attainment of knowledge and concepts in grades 4, 8, and 10. Although school districts generally gave high ratings to the contents of TerraNova (McGraw Hill), the testing instrument most recently…

The New Jersey Education Association charges that serious reporting errors in the state's minimum basic skills (MBS) testing program are causing some children to be falsely labelled as failures and are leading to misallocation of State Compensatory Education Aid, which is based on a formula using MBS scores. (SJL)

Whenever performance assessment has been introduced into statewide testing programs, various potentially paralyzing difficulties have been encountered surrounding test accuracy, reliability, validity, or suitability. Programs in some states have been discontinued or placed in jeopardy. It is uncertain whether educators can overcome these problems…

Although emphatically not against the concept of educational accountability, the National Education Association (NEA) feels that a redirection is needed in the implementation of such a system. Because of error, especially in testing minority and poor children, accountability programs should never use test results as the major source of data but…

One method to correct for selection bias in comparing Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores among states is presented, which is a modification of J. J. Heckman's Selection Bias Correction (1976, 1979). Empirical results suggest that sample selection bias is present in SAT score regressions. (SLD)