There is much debate over the impact of high stakes testing as well as a growing body of research focused on both the intended and unintended consequences of these tests. One claim of both the popular media and education researchers is that high stakes tests have led to curricular narrowing--the idea that school time is increasingly allocated to…

This article contributes to an emerging body of literature on the impact of high stakes testing accountability policies on implementation and teaching practice. It uses a theory of implementation, sense-making, to highlight the process by which policy and context shape teacher decision making. We focus on teachers in bilingual classrooms in an…

The opt-out movement, a grassroots coalition of opposition to high-stakes tests that are used to sort students, evaluate teachers, and rank schools, has the largest participation on Long Island, New York, where approximately 50% of the eligible students in grades three to eight opted out of the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics tests in…

Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) increasingly pressure teachers and schools to be accountable for instructional time in the form of improved test scores. As a result, students are given an increasing variety of assessments in a given school year in an attempt to measure academic…

We use visualization to find patterns in educational data. We represent student scores from high-stakes exams as flow vectors in fluids, define two types of streamlines and trajectories, and show that differences between streamlines and trajectories are due to regression to the mean. This issue is significant because it determines how quickly…

In Texas, fifth grade students are required to pass both the reading and math sections of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS test, in order to be promoted to the next grade level. The purpose of this study is to describe parents' perceptions of the influence of the high-stakes TAKS test on the family lives of at-risk fifth grade…

How to incorporate mobile students, who enter schools/classrooms after the start of the school year, into educational performance evaluations remains to be a challenge. As mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), all states currently require that a school is accountable only if the student has been enrolled in the school for a full…