Questionnaires in educational research assessing students' attitudes and beliefs are low-stakes for the students. As a consequence, students might not always consistently respond to a questionnaire scale but instead provide more random response patterns with no clear link to items' contents. We study inter-individual differences in students'…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program only reports state-level subgroup results if it samples at least 62 students identifying with the subgroup. Since some subgroups constitute small proportions of many states' general student populations, these minority subgroups are seldom sufficiently sampled to meet this sample size…

After 25 years with small to moderate gains in performance in mathematics, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) main assessment declined between 2013 and 2015 in Grades 4 and 8. Previous research has suggested the decline may be linked to the implementation of the "Common Core" state standards. In this…

Latent classes of effective and non-effective Algebra I teachers were established using measurements of teacher promoted engagement, teacher promoted understanding, and classroom management from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET Project) database. Historically, robust measures of effective teaching exist in the literature; however,…

The present study sought to extend prior research in the Chinese context by examining the role of demographic and socioeconomic factors in middle school students' motivation, engagement, academic buoyancy, and adaptability. A total of 2,434 middle school students (aged 11-15 years) in China participated in the study. For demographic factors,…

Diagnostic assessments are intended to support teachers' instructional decision making by providing instructionally relevant information. In this article, we propose that using cognitive theories of learning to design diagnostic assessments can provide teachers with two diagnostic outcomes: (a) the location of a student's thinking within the…

Vertical scales are widely used in educational assessment as a basis for considering grade-to-grade changes in student performance. Typically, the underlying construct is assumed to be essentially unidimensional; however, if there is a change in the measured construct across grades, this assumption may be untenable. Developing a multidimensional…

Instructionally supportive accountability tests (a) measure students' mastery of only a modest number of extraordinarily important curricular aims; (b) describe what is to be assessed in clear, teacher-palatable language; and (c) report each student's results for every curricular aim assessed. To determine the suitability of such assessments to…