This book is the work of the British Educational Research Association Assessment Policy Task Group who produced two of the four papers featured. They all address the reasons behind current UK assessment policy and how it might be improved.

Everyone is in favor of "high education standards" and "fair testing" of student achievement, but there is little agreement as to what these terms actually mean. High Stakes looks at how testing affects critical decisions for American students. As more and more tests are introduced into the country's schools, it becomes increasingly important to know how those tests are usedâ€"and misusedâ€"in assessing children's performance and achievements. High Stakes focuses on how testing is used in schools to make decisions about tracking and placement, promotion and retention, and awarding or withholding high school diplomas. This book sorts out the controversies that emerge when a test score can open or close gates on a student's educational pathway. The expert panel: Proposes how to judge the appropriateness of a test. Explores how to make tests reliable, valid, and fair. Puts forward strategies and practices to promote proper test use. Recommends how decisionmakers in education shouldâ€"and should notâ€"use test results. The book discusses common misuses of testing, their political and social context, what happens when test issues are taken to court, special student populations, social promotion, and more. High Stakes will be of interest to anyone concerned about the long-term implications for individual students of picking up that Number 2 pencil: policymakers, education administrators, test designers, teachers, and parents.

The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role. This report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers. According to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment that measures the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science every three years, U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education. The report proposes three overarching policy recommendations: implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security; make structural changes to provide students with good choices; and, launch a "national security readiness audit" to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.

The National Assessments of Educational Achievement Series introduces readers to key concepts and issues related to assessments of student achievement levels. The first volume focuses on policy issues which should be addressed when designing and carrying out a national assessment. It features country case studies, and descriptions of major international and regional assessment programs. The remaining books in the series cover test development, sampling, data cleaning, statistics, report writing and using national assessment results to improve educational quality.

The issues surrounding the comparability of various tests used to assess performance in schools received broad public attention during congressional debate over the Voluntary National Tests proposed by President Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union Address. Proponents of Voluntary National Tests argue that there is no widely understood, challenging benchmark of individual student performance in 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade mathematics, thus the need for a new test. Opponents argue that a statistical linkage among tests already used by states and districts might provide the sort of comparability called for by the president's proposal. Public Law 105-78 requested that the National Research Council study whether an equivalency scale could be developed that would allow test scores from existing commercial tests and state assessments to be compared with each other and with the National Assessment of Education Progress. In this book, the committee reviewed research literature on the statistical and technical aspects of creating valid links between tests and how the content, use, and purposes of education testing in the United States influences the quality and meaning of those links. The book summarizes relevant prior linkage studies and presents a picture of the diversity of state testing programs. It also looks at the unique characteristics of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Uncommon Measures provides an answer to the question posed by Congress in Public Law 105-78, suggests criteria for evaluating the quality of linkages, and calls for further research to determine the level of precision needed to make inferences about linked tests. In arriving at its conclusions, the committee acknowledged that ultimately policymakers and educators must take responsibility for determining the degree of imprecision they are willing to tolerate in testing and linking. This book provides science-based information with which to make those decisions.

This work looks at state involvement in education and education policy. It explains the role of education policy in the context of the general direction of government policy, politics and the economy.

To improve their education systems, countries around the world have increasingly initiated national largescale assessment programs or participated in international or regional large-scale assessment studies for the first time. Well-constructed large-scale assessments can provide credible information on student achievement levels, which, in turn, can promote better resource allocation to schools, stronger education service delivery, and improved learning outcomes. The World Bank developed this Primer on Large-Scale Assessments of Educational Achievement as a firststop resource for those wanting to understand how to design, administer, analyze, and use the results from these assessments of student achievement. The book addresses frequently asked questions from people working on large-scale assessment projects and those interested in making informed decisions about them. Each chapter introduces a stage in the assessment process and offers advice, guidelines, and country examples. This book also reports on emerging trends in large-scale assessment and provides updated information on regional and international large-scale assessment programs. DIRK HASTEDT, Executive Director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) “A special feature of the publication is that it not only gives an overview of technical specifications, but also includes examples from around the world on how countries are conducting large-scale assessments, what they found, and how the results were used. With this perspective, the Primer on Large-Scale Assessments of Educational Achievement is an excellent and easy-to-read publication to get a comprehensive overview of large-scale assessments and how and why they are conducted.†? SILVIA MONTOYA, Director of UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UNESCO UIS) “If you are responsible for learning assessment in a country and are searching for a comprehensive, yet readable, guide on large-scale assessment, this is your book. Extremely well structured and written, this primer is easy to follow, and makes points clearly and concisely. It is an excellent resource that explores the steps for a good large-scale assessment with examples from all international large-scale assessment programs.†? ANDREAS SCHLEICHER, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Secretary- General “Many countries have joined international educational assessments to benchmark quality, equity, and efficiency in their education systems. But what does it take to design and implement those efforts well and to draw value from this to help students learn better, teachers teach better, and schools to work more effectively? This Primer on Large-Scale Assessments of Educational Achievement helps policy makers and their technical teams to find answers to these questions.†? ANDREI VOLKOV, Director of the Institute for Public Strategy, Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO “In 2008, when the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) Program was launched, we determined its main goal as the improvement of the quality of basic education. Today, the READ Program keeps setting trends as the largest Russian initiative promoting educational assessment. Approaches developed within the READ Program, from building institutional and expert capacity to influencing educational reforms, have proven their efficacy in many countries. The Primer on Large-Scale Assessments of Educational Achievement brings together in a practical format the best experience and case studies in conducting assessments under the READ Program. An especially important feature of the book is an integrated capacity building component, which makes it a practical tutorial ready for use in different cultural contexts. Through this book, we hope that our collective experience gathered during READ will be widely shared, bringing us closer to achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal on education.†? evelopment Goal on Education.†?

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a survey mandated by the U.S. Congress to collect and report information about student achievement in various academic subjects, such as mathematics, science, reading, writing, history, geography, and civics. The National Assessment Governing Board sets policy and the overall dimensions for the assessment program. The Board has scheduled a National Assessment in civics for 2010 to gauge knowledge and skills about civics and government of the nation's 4th-, 8th-, and 12th-grade students. This civics assessment will use the same Framework as in 1998 to enable NAEP to report on trends in student achievement from 1998 to 2010. This document contains four chapters: (1) Introduction; (2) Civic Education and the Issues Framing the Assessment; (2) The Civics Assessment: Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions; and (4) Desired Attributes of the Assessment. Appendix A includes: (1) NAEP Civics Assessment Planning Process; and (2) A Note About Terminology. Appendix B includes: (1) Organizing Questions and Content Summary; (2) Intellectual Skills; (3) Participatory Skills; and (4) Civic Dispositions. Appendix C includes: (1) Steering Committee Members; (2) Planning Committee Members; and (3) Management Team. (Contains 3 tables.) [This document was developed under contract number ZA95001001 by the Council of Chief State School Officers with the Center for Civic Education and the American Institutes for Research for the National Assessment Governing Board.].