Standardized tests are often designed to provide only a snapshot of test takers' knowledge, skills, or abilities at a single point in time. Sometimes, however, they are expected to serve more demanding functions, one of them is assessing change in knowledge, skills, or ability over time because of learning effects.The latter is the case for the…

The OECD and its U.S. administrator, McGraw-Hill Education CTB, have recently concluded the first cycle of the OECD-Test for Schools in the U.S. This test is being marketed to local schools and is designed to compare 15-year-olds from individual participating schools against peers nationally and internationally using the OECD's PISA test as its…

This study used a series of text message inquiries sent to General Chemistry students asking: "Have you studied for General Chemistry I in the past 48 hours? If so, how did you study?" This method for collecting data is novel to chemistry education research so the first research goals were to investigate the feasibility of the technique…

Superintendents from districts in the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) challenged the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) to identify an approach to narrowing the minority student achievement gap in Algebra 1 without isolating minority students for intervention. SERP partnered with 8 MSAN districts and researchers from 3…

The Norwegian government recommends a systematic language assessment of all four-year-olds as part of the general health surveillance program for the purpose of identifying children at risk of language delay. This study aimed to investigate the construct validity of the recommended language screening tool called LANGUAGE4 [SPRÅK4] by first…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether, or to what extent, property wealth of the upper and lower 5% districts, per pupil expenditure, limited English proficient students, economically disadvantaged students, membership, and teacher experience contribute to student achievement in 5th grade reading and mathematics. To do this, the…

Every year there are high achievers at primary school, pupils scoring in the top 10% nationally in their Key Stage 2 (KS2) tests, yet who five years later receive a set of GCSE results that place them outside the top 25% of pupils. There are about 7,000 such pupils each year, 15% of all those we term as highly able. We call these pupils our…

Some universities administer standardized tests to estimate school effects on student learning. To that end, many of those institutions choose to gather cross-sectional data (freshmen and seniors in the same academic year) rather than longitudinal data. The effects of this decision on institutional assessment results are generally unknown. The…

A standardized exam for program-level assessment can take the form of 1) a customized exam developed in-house by faculty and linked explicitly to program-level learning goals; or 2) a standardized exam developed externally by assessment experts and linked to a set of somewhat broader and more generalizable learning goals. This article discusses…

In "How Is Testing Supposed to Improve Schooling?" Edward Haertel has proposed a framework for thinking about the mechanisms by which testing might improve the various educational processes undertaken in schools. The framework seems to the author to be quite general (he uses the word "general" here in its mathematical sense of including all cases)…

Education bureaucrats in 45 states have approved the Common Core State Standards ([CCSS], 2010) as the de facto national curriculum. The implementation of the CCSS will be monitored by a national standardized test in language arts and mathematics. The confluence of a standardized curriculum enforced with a standardized test will entrench a…

The author argues that access to books and time to read play a vital role in literacy development and explains why standardized tests are detrimental to students' literacy development.

This study investigated the relationship between the mathematics scores of public middle school students in Miami-Dade County on Florida's standardized test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) 2.0, and students' socio-economic status. The study found that SES had a strong correlation with the standardized test mathematics scores (r =…

Students with disabilities are increasingly included in general education science classrooms and are expected to demonstrate academic proficiency on standardized assessments. Teacher preparation and attitudes have been cited as major factors contributing to either the success or failure of students with disabilities in science. In order to assess…

This paper looks at results from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment to examine the effects of school libraries on students' test performance, with specific focus on the average of students' family wealth in a school. The paper documents students' school library use and students' home possessions to indicate how school…