State education departments and school districts face an important challenge in implementing a new law that requires disadvantaged students to be held to the same standards as other students. The new requirements come from provisions of the 1994 reauthorization of Title I, the largest federal effort in precollegiate education, which provides aid to "level the field" for disadvantaged students. Testing, Teaching, and Learning is written to help states and school districts comply with the new law, offering guidance for designing and implementing assessment and accountability systems. This book examines standards-based education reform and reviews the research on student assessment, focusing on the needs of disadvantaged students covered by Title I. With examples of states and districts that have track records in new systems, the committee develops a practical "decision framework" for education officials. The book explores how best to design assessment and accountability systems that support high levels of student learning and to work toward continuous improvement. Testing, Teaching, and Learning will be an important tool for all involved in educating disadvantaged studentsâ€"state and local administrators and classroom teachers.

Argues that education in the States and Britain has been radically transformed, through efforts to create curricular standards, and through an emphasis on accountability measured by standardized tests, and efforts to introduce market competition and private services into educational systems.

How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can’t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be—well, complicated. Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, Measuring Up demystifies educational testing—from MCAS to SAT to WAIS, with all the alphabet soup in between. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Daniel Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education. He walks readers through everyday examples to show what tests do well, what their limits are, how easily tests and scores can be oversold or misunderstood, and how they can be used sensibly to help discover how much kids have learned.

America's leading expert in educational testing and measurement openly names the failures caused by today's testing policies and provides a blueprint for doing better. 6 x 9.

Amplify your assessment literacy. Formative, data-driven, high-stakes—we all know the buzzwords surrounding educational testing. But we often shelve our understanding of these because they are overwhelmingly complex. Those who care about our schools and students—teachers, administrators, policymakers, parents, citizens—will discover how and why testing should be taken upon ourselves to advance. Using a nontechnical approach, this book offers fundamental knowledge to free you from testing fogginess—all framed around practical actions you can take to strengthen your assessment literacy. Inappropriate tests are leading to mistaken decisions, and this book provides everything you need to know to change that, including Reasons for tests Reliability/validity Fairness Test-building

Arguing that traditional, test-based evaluation has a negative effect on many students, this book describes new methods of assessing student performance.

Based on a large-scale international study of teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Ontario, and New York, this book illustrates the ways increased use of high-stakes standardized testing is fundamentally changing education in the US and Canada with a negative overall impact on the way teachers teach and students learn. Standardized testing makes understanding students' strengths and weaknesses more difficult, and class time spent on testing consumes scarce time and attention needed to support the success of all students—further disadvantaging ELLs, students with exceptionalities, low income, and racially minoritized students.