A state superintendent of education discusses standards from the point of view of a policymaker, acknowledging both educational and political elements. The objective for the policymaker is to take the work of researchers and educational theorists and make it something that practitioners and ultimately the public can understand. The first thing is…

By 2008, according to this policy brief, half the states are likely to have adopted high-school exit exams. These exams, which students must pass to graduate, are part of state accountability systems and are above and beyond the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. This brief discusses high-school exit exams. It begins with answers to…

The Delaware Student Testing Program ties student achievement to the state's content standards that define the knowledge and skills Delaware students need to succeed beyond high school. This report explains the testing program and how to interpret it for administrators and boards of education. Each school receives English language and mathematics…

The Delaware Student Testing Program ties student achievement to the state's content standards that define the knowledge and skills Delaware students need to succeed beyond high school. This report explains the testing program to teachers and presents a guide to interpreting test results. Section 1 introduces the testing program, which tests…

This report provides important state-by-state information on the characteristics and performance of schools and students in each state, information that is vital to monitoring the progress and evaluating the success of local, state, and national education reforms. The report disaggregates student achievement data so that attention can be focused…

This document reports the levels of skill achievement by Florida students as measured by the High School Competency Test (HSCT) and explains the purpose, reporting, and use of HSCT test results. This test measures the ability of students to apply basic skills in communication and mathematics successfully in everyday life situations. Students in…

The 1997-98 school year was the 18th year of statewide student testing under the Arizona Student Achievement Program mandated by Arizona law. For the 1997-98 school year, students in grades 3 through 12 were tested using the Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition (Stanford 9). This test was administered statewide to 536,254 Arizona students in…

Correlations of National Teacher Examination (NTE) Core Battery scores and college grade point average (GPA) with a measure of teaching effectiveness for 493 first-year teachers indicate that the correlation is higher for GPA than for the Core Battery. NTE core scores do not predict effectiveness better than GPA alone. (SLD)

Explores issues of whose work is actually being evaluated when raters outside the classroom context make judgments about students based on work composed with the support of peers, teachers, and parents. Data from an evaluation of a statewide assessment and a study of scoring elementary school writing portfolios illustrate the issues. (SLD)

Washington State University (WSU), has developed two large-scale assessment programs to evaluate student learning outcomes. The largest, the Writing Assessment Program, diagnoses student writing abilities at entry and mid-career to determine the type of support needed to navigate the expectations of our writing-rich curriculum. The second, the…

Efforts to improve social studies at the elementary level have not fared well in recent years. Federal demands for greater emphasis on mathematics and reading instruction have had a direct impact on social studies instruction--eroding elementary teachers' time and energy for the subject. In spite of this changing context, many states still test…

When a state test and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are both measuring the same construct, the achievement gaps between subgroups on both tests should be the same. However, if a teacher or school engages in "teaching to the test" then student performance may improve on one test but not on another. We hypothesized that…

The Center on Education Policy (CEP) has been studying state high school exit examinations since 2002. This is the sixth annual report on our comprehensive study of exit exams. The information comes from several sources: our survey of states that have mandatory exit exams, interviews with state officials, media reports, state Web sites, and case…

Neither teacher-made tests nor the Scholastic Aptitude Test are appropriate for measuring the attainment of national education goals. Most practitioners involved in discussions of national high-stakes examinations argue that new tests are needed. A new system that preserves state and local autonomy in education as it measures the attainment of…

The DATAWave is a weekly publication of the Assessment Resource Office of Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU). Its purpose is to inform the campus community and broader constituencies about assessment issues and practice at ENMU. The issues of this first volume cover the following assessment topics: (1) introduction to the newsletter and report…