Through a series of shifting majorities, the Court upheld the textbook loan, standardized testing and scoring, diagnostic services, and therapeutic services provisions of the Ohio statute and struck down the instructional materials and field trip sections of the law. (Author)

A set of guidelines for planning and establishing a certification testing program is presented. The guidelines are organized into three components: (1) content specification; (2) item development; and (3) test design. A mythical new certification testing program, called the Tennis Players' Certification Testing Program, is used to illustrate the…

Dr. Charles Pine responds to questions concerning the definition of good teaching; his personal instructional approaches; New Jersey's basic skills testing program for college freshmen; ways to improve math instruction; and the New Jersey Algebra Project, a three-year curriculum revision effort for seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. (DMM)

The Eindtoets Basisonderwijs (final primary school test) is a Dutch national achievement test taken annually by 90,000 pupils. This article overviews the Dutch educational system and describes this testing program, emphasizing test equating methods. Evaluation findings from 1980 and resulting changes in test content and evaluation reports are also…

Reports findings from a national survey of 1,269 representative colleges and universities, concerning institutional perceptions of the basic skills preparation of entering freshmen, the extent of students' needs for basic skills help at various types of institutions, and the ways in which institutions are responding to student needs. (AYC)

To find the students who need help, college officials are starting new testing programs, sharing more information with high-school teachers and administrators, and joining with high schools to sponsor special programs for students and teachers. Programs in Ohio, New Jersey, and Florida are described. (MLW)

Tests like the Ohio Graduation Test are part of what has become known as the "standards-based" reform movement in education. Simply put, they allow states to measure whether or not students are learning according to whatever set of standards, benchmarks and indicators are adopted by that state. They also help meet, in part, the reporting…

Texas has apparently achieved great success in closing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, at least in the lower grades. Texas students in all grades have made substantial gains on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). The effect of TAAS-type accountability on student performance in the higher grades is important,…

This paper reports on teachers' views of the effects of compulsory numeracy testing in Years 3, 5, and 7 in Queensland schools. Teachers were surveyed on (i) the validity and worth of the tests, (ii) the impact the tests had on their teaching of mathematics, and (iii) how they were using the results of the tests. Although the results reveal a…

This paper is a case study of Kentucky's attempt to fix not only failing schools but a failing public school system. It reports on the policy making and implementation conundrums of the debate over Kentucky's high stakes accountability system. As a political policy analysis, the study relies on documents, media reports, and interviews with key…

This study examined the cross-lingual equating process adopted by a large scale testing system in which target language (TL) forms are equated to the source language (SL) forms using a set of translated items. The focus was on evaluating the degree of error inherent in the routine cross-lingual equating of the Verbal Reasoning subtest of the…

This guide is designed to give the student helpful information about Arizona's Instrument To Measure the Standards (AIMS) for high school. The guide provides examples of the type of questions students see on AIMS and explains how items are scored. It does not teach what the student needs to know to do well on AIMS, but it will help the student…

The use of portfolios in assessing student achievement is contrasted with the use of standardized tests. Portfolios are considered more subjective than scores from standardized tests, and they present different issues in assessing and reporting student progress. Interscorer reliability may be a problem because of a lack of agreement about the…

The Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) was a major new initiative in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), North Carolina, in 2000. The ALP was designed to help WCPSS meet its achievement goal of 95% of students scoring at or above grade level at grades 3 and 8 by 2003, with grade levels determined by the North Carolina End of Grade tests.…

Texas students have made extraordinarily large gains on statewide achievement tests, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), gains so dramatic that they have been dubbed the "Texas miracle." There is general agreement that these gains are attributable to the high stakes accountability system in Texas, but there is some question…