Educational Tests and Assessment Resource Guide

With international tests showing that the United States no longer leads in school achievement, a bipartisan coalition of reformers is advocating the creation of more charter schools and a system of basing pay and firing decisions for teachers on students' standardized test scores.

IQ and aptitude tests have come under increasing criticism in recent years as measures of real-world intelligence. Although educators still generally consider them good predictors of school performance, a faction of the psychological community is challenging the use of traditional standardized tests.

Title III of Public Law 107-110 (No Child Left Behind; NCLB) provided for creation of assessments of English language learners (ELLs) and established, through the Enhanced Assessment Grant program, a platform from which four consortia of states developed ELL tests aligned to rigorous statewide content standards. Those four tests (ACCESS for ELLs, CELLA, ELDA, and MWA) are now in use in one or more states, along with a host of other commercially available or locally developed tests.

This study investigated the use of accommodations and the performance of students with visual impairments and severe cognitive disabilities on the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment (PASA)yCoan alternate performance-based assessment.

State assessments are increasingly used as outcome measures for education evaluations. The scaling of state assessments produces variability in measurement error, with the conditional standard error of measurement increasing as average student ability moves toward the tails of the achievement distribution. This report examines the variability in pretest-posttest correlation coefficients of state assessment data for samples of low-performing, average-performing, and proficient students to illustrate how sample characteristics (including the measurement error of observed scores) affect pretest-posttest correlation coefficients.