Standardized testing and accountability are currently unavoidable components of Texas Public Education. Through years of push-back, parents and educators have demanded that Texas consider alternative testing options that would reduce the high-stakes testing burden on students and schools. In 2015, the State of Texas passed legislation requiring…

Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two…

In this study, we employed a new instructional model that helps students develop scientific writing and presentation skills. Argument-driven inquiry (ADI) is one of the most novel instructional models that emphasizes the role of argumentation and inquiry in science education equally. This is an exploratory study where five ADI lab activities take…

On the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessments, the attainment of performance level 4 is intended to indicate college readiness or being "on track" to college and career readiness. Students who achieve Level 4 should have a 0.75 probability of attaining at least a C in entry-level,…

Rubrics for assessing student performance are often seen as providing rich information about complex skills. Despite their widespread usage, however, little empirical research has focused on whether it is possible for rubrics to validly meet their intended purposes. The authors examine a rubric used to assess students' writing in a large-scale…

This study examined the relationship between ninth-grade students' use of connectives (temporal, causal, adversative, and additive) in functional writing and performance on standards-based/criterion-referenced measures of reading and writing. Specifically, structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were used to examine the relationship between…

The purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between students' scores on Academy of READING (AOR) and their performance on the Georgia End of Course Test (GEOCT) for Ninth Grade Literature and Composition. The participants were ninth grade students enrolled in Ninth Grade Literature and Composition during the 2009-2010 school year at a…

Commercial publishers have shaped reading and writing instruction in American schools through their interpretations of state-developed reading and writing standards and standards-aligned materials, which teachers then implement in English classes, including those serving multilingual learners. This paper uses microethnographic discourse analysis…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

This report focuses on the initial development of the predicted score paths for ACT Aspire reporting. The paths provide predicted score ranges for the next two years--as well as predicted ACT score ranges for tests administered at grades 9 and 10. Longitudinal ACT Aspire data for students tested in spring 2013 and spring 2014, as well as…

The present study examined pedagogic components of Chinese reading literacy in a representative sample of 1164 Grades 7, 9 and 11 Chinese students (mean age of 15 years) from 11 secondary schools in Hong Kong with each student tested for about 2.5 hours. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses showed that across the three grade levels, the…

Development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the creation of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), changes the pattern of accountability testing. These changes raise the question: "How should NAEP's validity and utility be…

The "Common European Framework of Reference" (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001) provides a competency model that is increasingly used as a point of reference to compare language examinations. Nevertheless, aligning examinations to the CEFR proficiency levels remains a challenge. In this article, we propose a new, level-centered approach to…

This Information Capsule answers the most frequently asked questions about M-DCPS' academic performance during the 2011-2012 school year. Over the past year, the Florida Department of Education made over 28 changes to the school grading formula, including the transition to new, more rigorous assessments, new accountability components, and…

Many national reports indicate that more attention needs to be placed on writing and the teaching of writing in schools. The purpose of this quantitative study was to, first, examine the structure of the DWA and, second, to use the scores from the DWA to examine the relationship between ELL status and writing proficiency. Five major research…