Developing Tests and Questionnaires for a National Assessment of Educational Achievement is the second in the National Assessments of Educational Achievement series. It is designed to help build capacity in carrying out technically adequate assessments of national levels of student achievement. It introduces readers to the activities involved in the development of achievement tests, and includes developing an assessment framework, writing multiple choice and constructed response type items, pretesting, producing test booklets, and handscoring items. A section on questionnaire construction feat.

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.

Implementation of a National Assessment of Educational Achievement focuses on the practical tasks involved in running a large-scale national assessment program. It has four parts. Part I provides an overview of the tasks involved - how the essential activities of an assessment are organized and implemented, the personnel and resources that are required, and the tasks that follow the collection of data. In Part II, a methodology for selecting a sample of students that will be representative of students in the education system is presented. Principles underlying sampling are described, as well as step-by-step procedures that can be implemented in nearly any national assessment. An accompanying CD contains supporting data files. Part III describes procedures for cleaning and managing data collected in a national assessment, essential elements of a quality assurance process. It also describes how to export and import data, that is, make data available in a format that is appropriate for users of statistical software such as Access, SPSS, WesVar, and Excel. The primary objective of this section is to enable the national assessment team develop and implement a systematic set of procedures to help ensure that the assessment data are accurate and reliable. Following sampling, test administration, data entry, and cleaning, the next step is to prepare data for analysis. In Part IV, a series of important pre-analysis steps, including producing estimates, computing and using survey weights, and computing estimates are described. The section dealing with the computation of estimates describes how they and their sampling errors are computed from simple and complex samples. Finally, a range of special topics, including nonresponse and issues relating to over-and under-size schools, is addressed.

Policy makers are caught between two powerful forces in relation to testing in America's schools. One is increased interest on the part of educators, reinforced by federal requirements, in developing tests that accurately reflect local educational standards and goals. The other is a strong push to gather information about the performance of students and schools relative to national and international standards and norms. The difficulty of achieving these two goals simultaneously is exacerbated by both the long-standing American tradition of local control of education and the growing public sentiment that students already take enough tests. Finding a solution to this dilemma has been the focus of numerous debates surrounding the Voluntary National Tests proposed by President Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union address. It was also the topic of a congressionally mandated 1998 National Research Council report (Uncommon Measures: Equivalence and Linkage Among Educational Tests), and was touched upon in a U.S. General Accounting Office report (Student Testing: Issues Related to Voluntary National Mathematics and Reading Tests). More recently, Congress asked the National Research Council to determine the technical feasibility, validity, and reliability of embedding test items from the National Assessment of Educational Progress or other tests in state and district assessments in 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade mathematics for the purpose of developing a valid measure of student achievement within states and districts and in terms of national performance standards or scales. This report is the response to that congressional mandate.