Predictive analytics in education can offer a benefit as long as educators heed the differences between how the tools are used in industry and how they should be used differently in schooling. Perhaps most important, teachers already know a great deal about their students — far more than an investor knows about a stock or a baseball scout about an up-and-coming pitcher.

In this podcast, Nate Jensen discusses the value of assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards and the misconceptions that accompanied the implementation of new assessments in some states.

This study examined the utility of response time‐based analyses in understanding the behavior of unmotivated test takers. For the data from an adaptive achievement test, patterns of observed rapid‐guessing behavior and item response accuracy were compared to the behavior expected under several types of models that have been proposed to represent unmotivated test taking behavior.

This study investigates the use of screening assessments within the increasingly popular Response to Intervention (RTI) framework, specifically seeking to collect concurrent validity evidence on one potential new screening tool, the Independent Reading Level Assessment (IRLA) framework.

This study examined the measurement stability of a set of Rasch measurement scales that have been in place for almost 40 years.

This article addresses the issue by estimating teacher value added, then applying extremely mild nonlinear transformations to the original scale and re-estimating the value added. Although by definition at most one of these scales can be equal-interval, all are treated as if interval-scaled when estimating value added.

The current study outlines a general process for measuring item-level effort that can be applied to an expanded set of item types and test-taking behaviors (such as omitted or constructed responses). This process, which is illustrated with data from a large-scale assessment program, should improve our ability to detect non-effortful test taking and perform individual score validation.