This study operationalizes four measures of instructional differentiation: one for Grade 2 English language arts (ELA), one for Grade 2 mathematics, one for Grade 5 ELA, and one for Grade 5 mathematics. Our study evaluates their measurement properties of each measure in a large field experiment: the Indiana Diagnostic Assessment Tools Study, which…

In traditional studies on value-added indicators of educational effectiveness, students are usually treated as belonging to those schools where they took their final examination. However, in practice, students sometimes attend multiple schools and therefore it is questionable whether this assumption of belonging to the last school they attended…

The usefulness of multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) for the assessment of student literacy in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was examined within a real data simulation study. The responses of N = 14,624 students who participated in the PISA assessments of the years 2000, 2003, and 2006 in Germany were used to…

This study examined discrepant high school grade point average (HSGPA) and SAT performance as measured by the difference between a student's standardized SAT composite score and standardized HSGPA. The SAT-HSGPA discrepancy measure was used to examine whether certain students are more likely to exhibit discrepant performance and in what direction.…

This article examines the multilevel linear crossed random effects growth model for estimating teacher and school effects from repeated measurements of student achievement. Results suggest that even a small degree of unmodeled nonlinearity can result in a substantial upward bias in the magnitude of the teacher effect, which raises concerns about…

This study investigated convergent validity evidence for student growth scores with high school course grades. The Measures of Academic Progress and Educational Planning and Assessment System growth scores for approximately 1,800 ninth-grade students over 2 years were related to language, arts, and mathematics course grades for developmental,…

It is shown that the Angoff and bookmarking cut scores are examples of true score equating that in the real world must be applied to observed scores. In the context of defining minimal competency, the percentage "failed" by such methods is a function of the length of the measuring instrument. It is argued that this length is largely arbitrary,…

There has been growing interest in comparing achievement goal orientations across ethnic groups. Such comparisons, however, cannot be made until validity evidence has been collected to support the use of an achievement goal orientation instrument for that purpose. Therefore, this study investigates the measurement invariance of a particular…

In meta-analysis, it is common to have dependent effect sizes, such as several effect sizes from the same sample but measured at different times. Cheung and Chan proposed the adjusted-individual and adjusted-weighted procedures to estimate the degree of dependence and incorporate this estimate in the meta-analysis. The present study extends the…

Motivation deficits are common in high school and constitute a significant problem for both students and teachers. The Academic Amotivation Inventory (AAI) was developed to measure the multidimensional nature of the academic amotivation construct (Legault, Green-Demers, & Pelletier, 2006). The present project further examined the consistency of…

The properties of the achievement goal inventories developed by Grant and Dweck (2003) and Elliot and McGregor (2001) were evaluated in two studies with a total of 780 participants. A four-factor specification for the Grant and Dweck inventory did not closely replicate results published in their original report. In contrast, the structure of the…

This study examined the reliability and validity of the scores of a Chinese-translated version of the Gifted Rating Scales-School Form (GRS-S) using parents as raters and explored the effects of gender and grade on the ratings. A total of 222 parents participated in the study and rated their child independently using the Chinese version of the…

This investigation assesses performance and mastery orientation from a Rasch perspective among high school and university students and provides a complementary approach to the factor analytic methods typical in goal theory research. Data shows that both school and university students are high in mastery orientation relative to performance…

Interest in end-of-year accountability exams has increased dramatically since the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. With this increased interest comes a desire to use student data collected throughout the year to estimate student proficiency and predict how well they will perform on end-of-year exams. This article uses student…

Confirmatory factor analysis was used to explore the internal validity of scores on the TerraNova Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills/5 using samples from a southwestern school district and standardization samples reported by the publisher. One of the strengths claimed for battery-type achievement tests is provision of reliable and valid samples…