This paper traces the process of designing and administering a structured survey on dropping out of school to demonstrate the means by which working with organizations and their clients impacts research methodology. A dropout accounting system had been developed for the Ysleta Independent School District, a district with an enrollment of 50,000…

This digest explains basic elements of standardized tests in order to help teachers in making students feel comfortable about taking such tests. Usually created by commercial publishers, standardized tests are designed to provide a common measure of students' performance. They help compare an individual student's performance with the performance…

Both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced interpretations of student, school, district, and state testing data can be improved by customizing the traditional norm-referenced test. Improvements that can be made include: (1) increasing the relevance of the test to the curriculum and (2) having greater confidence in the national comparative…

The extent to which national performance on an achievement test battery changed over a 4-year period was studied, and the comparative performance of students in school districts taking the test series for the first time was compared with that of students in districts that had used the battery at least once in one or more grades. The seventh…

A review and assessment of states' reform actions, measurement techniques, and the relevance of the reforms for New York State are addressed in this collection of papers from a working seminar on the purpose of schooling and the means of producing higher levels of achievement. The first paper, "Education Reform in the State: A Comparative…

This document provides statements presented at the oversight hearing on testing and assessment evaluation to improve learning in the nation's schools. Walter Haney summarizes the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy's recent report, which concluded that while well-designed and responsibly used assessment is an important source of…

Information was gathered about current state interest, activity, and concerns related to performance assessment for students. The Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing of the University of California (Los Angeles) conducted telephone interviews with directors of testing in each of the 50 states in the spring of 1990.…

Performance-based assessment has the potential to support a richer curriculum and more accurately assess the skills of low-income minority students than standardized tests. Performance-based assessment has the following advantages: (1) it allows a wide range of expression; (2) it permits assessment of learning in a natural context while students…

The construction of objective tests for native language reading comprehension is described. The tests were designed for the early secondary school years in several kinds of schools, vocational and non-vocational. The description focuses on the use of the Rasch model in test development, to develop a large pool of homogenous items and establish…

The major purpose of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is to provide information useful for improving the quality of American elementary and secondary schools. NAEP has focused more on the measurement of academic achievement than on the need for information on learning contexts. Additional information is needed about why…

This paper explores some of the issues involved in developing an index of functional literacy that can serve diagnostic purposes. In 1985, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett outlined principles for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), including a principle calling for NAEP to "develop an index of functional literacy…

Two approaches to testing student achievement are discussed: (1) traditional standardized tests; and (2) testing achievement on an instructional unit. Content validity is a major problem with standardized achievement tests. Even though test publishers typically consider a number of curriculum guides and textbooks in producing a test which is…

The problem of measuring growth across the target grade and, typically, the two adjacent grades, concerns most developers of standardized, norm-referenced achievement tests, particularly at the item selection stage. Opinion is divided on whether to retain or drop items that do not get easier from grade to grade. The controversy has focused on…

A study was conducted to determine if there were significant differences in vision between beginning readers who learn to read easily and those who learn with difficulty (dyslexics). In addition, the study examined the mean of the high achievers (rather than expert opinion) to discover the degree to which visual efficiency was normally needed for…

Four discrimination indices were compared, using score distributions which were normal, bimodal, and negatively skewed. The score distributions were systematically varied to represent the common circumstances of a military training situation using criterion-referenced mastery tests. Three 20-item tests were administered to 110 simulated subjects.…