5.13.14 Research insights into educator goal setting Goal setting is a hot topic in education. Being a curious fellow, I wondered what the substantial 45-year body of research on the topic of individual goal setting and its impact on task performance... Read more
4.10.14 Research Partnership Highlights NWEA’s Local Commitment Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) is a proud partner of the Multnomah County Partnership for Education Research. This coalition, established in July 2013 with the University of Portland,... Read more
3.25.14 “Close Reading” or “Reading Closely”? In several blog posts, I have expressed misgivings about “close reading” as an aspect of the implementation of the CCSS, most recently in this post. Last month, CUNY English professor Aaron... Read more
3.18.14 Student Engagement Affects Test Performance Educators rely on student achievement test performance to provide important information for a variety of inferences they wish to make about education. Educators use test scores to gather information... Read more
12.18.13 Assessment Literacy – Six Building Blocks to a High-Quality Test The value of any assessment is in the decisions it enables educators to make – it is always intended to be a tool for enhancing teaching and, ultimately, learning. Assessment is a process of... Read more
11.28.13 Using the Percentage of Students Meeting or Exceeding Their Growth Projections as an Evaluation Tool Of all of the statistics provided by NWEA in our series of reports, perhaps the easiest to understand and the most widely used is the percentage of students in a classroom, grade-level, or school who... Read more
11.25.13 Five Characteristics of Quality Educational Assessments – Part Four This is our final blog post in the series that has broken down the five characteristics of quality educational assessments. Our first blog post highlighted the need for content validity and our... Read more
11.11.13 Five Characteristics of Quality Educational Assessments – Part Three Assessment Literacy involves understanding how assessments are made, what type of assessments answer what questions, and how the data from assessments can be used to help teachers, students, parents,... Read more
11.6.13 Five characteristics of quality educational assessments: Part two Assessment designers strive to create assessments that show a high degree of fidelity to the following five traits: 1. Content validity2. Reliability3. Fairness4. ... Read more
11.4.13 The 30 Million Word Difference For decades, education researchers have found that children from lower-income and less-educated parents typically enter kindergarten with limited language skills compared to their more privileged... Read more
11.1.13 Five characteristics of quality educational assessments: Part one Assessment literacy involves understanding how assessments are made, what type of assessments answer what questions, and how the data from assessments can be used to help teachers, students,... Read more
10.23.13 STEM and Early Learning – A Little Help from Sesame Street STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics - has become a popular topic in education, particularly since 2006 when the President called for greater focus on these subjects to ensure... Read more