Educational assessments must include accommodations in the pursuit of accessibility for all, but the development and drive for accommodations on assessments is everchanging. This paper looks to review the accommodations landscape— discovering the past, highlighting our present progress, and uncovering new areas to explore.

Achievement gaps are a metric of fundamental importance to U.S. practice and policy. Gap estimates are often used to measure the effectiveness and fairness of the education system at a given point in time, over the course of decades, and as children progress through school.

In this article, we examined the prevalence of rapid guessing to determine if this behavior varied by grade, subject, and teacher, and evaluated if rapid guessing influenced teacher value-added estimates. We observed differences in rapid guessing across grades, subjects, and teachers; however, this behavior did not appear to have a substantive effect on teacher value-added estimates.

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.

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.

Positive student achievement and growth results for students in New York suggest that improvements to the teacher evaluation process that emphasize the importance of strong evaluation procedures, the systematic collection of evidence of teacher performance, and the use of data to inform the process, have promise for improving educator effectiveness far more than a narrower punitive approach.

Of particular debate is the impact of transferring from a traditional public school to a charter school on student achievement and growth. We employ propensity score stratification and multilevel models to balance key covariates between treatment and control groups of a cross-state sample of students, which provides a more complex picture of charter school achievement effects in a quasi-experimental context.