Opponents of so-called high-stakes testing complain that such intense pressure causes teachers to devote virtually all classroom time and resources to preparing students for the standardized test. This phenomenon is called "teaching to the test." Proponents of high-stakes testing respond that that is exactly as it should be. They argue…

Over the last decade education in the United States has undergone perhaps its most significant transformation. Where in the past public schools have been primarily under the control of the local community, control has shifted to the state and federal levels. Furthermore, state and federal governments have introduced standardized testing and…

For as long as there have been standardized tests that provide "objective" data about student performance, there has been an understandable, though often misguided, inclination to use that data to judge the performance of schools, teachers and students. Paralleling the rise of high-stakes statewide achievement testing in recent years, that…

In 2002, Michael Bloomberg, New York City's newly elected mayor, hoped to fix his city's public schools, which were widely perceived as plagued by a gamut of problems that ranged from low test scores to patronage-riddled schools and districts. A special bill approved by the New York State Legislature made Bloomberg solely accountable to the New…

Simplifying test questions so that they avoid unnecessarily complex English is the best way for states to include English-language learners in large-scale testing, according to the most prominent researcher on testing accommodations for such students. But other scholars say not enough studies have been conducted to know how states should alter…

Test validity issues considered by test developers and school districts rarely include individual item readability levels. In this study, items from a major standardized test were examined for individual item readability level and item difficulty. The Homan-Hewitt Readability Formula was applied to items across three grade levels. Results of…

The authors report on an evaluation of a comprehensive school reform initiative in one elementary school intended to provide meaningful and sustainable structure, substance, and support to the school's critical need to improve students' standardized test scores. Serious implementation and communication problems during the year of the evaluation…

The goal of No Child Left Behind Act is for 100% of all children to pass their state's standardized tests by the year 2014. With the act steadily increasing expectations for schools, teachers are scrambling to raise test scores. Because the arts are not included in most state standardized tests, schools are cutting these programs and putting all…

A growing number of the US schools, under the microscope of increased accountability, are identified as underperforming on the basis of low-test scores. Yet sustained increases in student achievement are problematic for underperforming schools.

The Advanced Placement (AP) exams have a significant impact on teaching English and the AP scores are recognized by most of the colleges and universities in the United States. The limitations of timed, standardized writing are discussed.

This qualitative research project studied the efforts of a small public elementary school over the course of 1 academic year to meet higher standards imposed by the state. The state's department of education defined school success in terms of the percentage of students passing a set of multiple-choice, standardized tests in four core areas of the…

Two studies examined the short- and long-term effects of teaching strategic reading to first-year college students in a stand-alone course. In study one, developmental readers (N=36) learned PLAN, a strategic reading heuristic. Significant pretest-posttest growth was found using cognitive, metacognitive, and affective measures, though no gain was…

Parents are an essential component in their children's SAT success, says Starlett Craig, director of outreach and enrichment programs at Clemson University in South Carolina. Clemson is home to a successful two-week SAT summer camp, where students are immersed in workshops that prepare them for the exam. But whether a child goes to a SAT camp or…

There has been a continuing drama over the unanswered question of whether students with disabilities deserve a high school diploma. Currently, a student is awarded a high school diploma if he or she meets local standards and if he or she passes the state's competency test of if his or her passage of the Indiana Standardized Test of Educational…

Although studies have been conducted to examine the effects of a variety of factors on the comparability of scores obtained from standardized patient examinations (SPE), little research has been conducted to specifically investigate the challenge of detecting drift in case difficulty estimates over time, particularly for large-scale,…