Standardized testing is an external control mechanism for K-12 public schools. Principals, nested between internal and external influences, must manage the tension created by testing's roles as both an internal improvement tool and as an external control mechanism. Five competing narratives, each shaped by author academic background, significantly…

More than 80 individuals representing staff from state departments of education, school districts, other countries, testing and testing-related companies, and other educational organizations participated in a forum on June 20, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to discuss the need for common accessibility language across assessment platforms. The…

With an increase in the number of online tests, interruptions during testing due to unexpected technical issues seem unavoidable. For example, interruptions occurred during several recent state tests. When interruptions occur, it is important to determine the extent of their impact on the examinees' scores. There is a lack of research on this…

Widespread technical failures and interruptions of recent online testing in a number of states have shaken the confidence of educators and policymakers in high-tech assessment methods and raised serious concerns about schools' technological readiness for the coming common-core online tests. The glitches arose as many districts in the 46 states…

Retrieving studied materials often enhances subsequent learning of new materials (Pastötter & Bäuml, 2014). However, retrieval has also been shown to impair new learning (Finn & Roediger, 2013). In this article, we attempted to determine when retrieval enhances and when it impairs new learning. We argue that testing impairs new learning…

There is a growing concern that when scores from low-stakes assessments are reported without considering student motivation as a construct of interest, biased conclusions about how much students know will result. Low motivation is a problem particularly relevant to low-stakes testing scenarios, which may be low stakes for the test taker but have…

Applied linguists should strive to ensure that the tests they design and use are not only fair and socially acceptable, but also have positive effects--this, in light of the fact that tests can sometimes have far-reaching and often detrimental effects on test-takers. What this paper will attempt to do, is highlight how this concern for responsible…

As a result of the upcoming Federal reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA), practitioners and researchers have begun vigorously debating what constitutes evidence-based assessment for the identification of specific learning disability (SLD). This debate has resulted in strong support for a method that…

There is strong theoretical support for oral reading fluency (ORF) as an essential building block of reading proficiency. The current and standard ORF assessment procedure requires that students read aloud a grade-level passage (˜ 250 words) in a one-to-one administration, with the number of words read correctly in 60 seconds constituting their…

This article begins by defining "world Englishes" (WEs) and the related paradigm of inner-, outer-, and expanding-circle English(es). The discussion then turns to the central concerns of the WEs and language testing (LT) communities with regard to how English tests can best be constructed to include various WEs by discussing (a) what…

The Hope Scale is an 11-item teacher-rating instrument designed to help identify academic and social components of giftedness. It provides insights from teachers who work with students on a daily basis, which may differ from the type of information yielded through achievement and ability tests. The Hope Scale development was made possible by the…

The term "standardized" tests is often heard along with "high-stakes." Standardized tests are administered, scored, and interpreted in a consistent way, so that the performances of large groups of students can be compared. They are not in themselves high-stakes, but they are often used for high-stakes purposes such as…

David Thissen, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Quantitative Program at the University of North Carolina, has consulted and served on technical advisory committees for assessment programs that use item response theory (IRT) over the past couple decades. He has come to the conclusion that there are usually two purposes…

The American university is currently undergoing a period of often-uncomfortable public scrutiny. Rising tuition costs and attendant higher student loan debt loads have caused both considerable human hardship and considerable criticism of individual institutions and the college education system as a whole. This report presents the following: (1) a…

The overall purpose of the research studies described in this report was to investigate the quality of the administration of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment during its first operational year (2014-2015). Findings from these studies can be used to identify threats to the validity of PARCC test…