A volume in The MARCES Book Series Series Editor: Robert W. Lissitz, University of Maryland Modeling student growth has been a federal policy requirement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In addition to tracking student growth, the latest Race To The Top (RTTP) federal education policy stipulates the evaluation of teacher effectiveness from the perspective of added value that teachers contribute to student learning and growth. Student growth modeling and teacher value-added modeling are complex. The complexity stems, in part, from issues due to non-random assignment of students into classes and schools, measurement error in students' achievement scores that are utilized to evaluate the added value of teachers, multidimensionality of the measured construct across multiple grades, and the inclusion of covariates. National experts at the Twelfth Annual Maryland Assessment Research Center's Conference on "Value Added Modeling and Growth Modeling with Particular Application to Teacher and School Effectiveness" present the latest developments and methods to tackle these issues. This book includes chapters based on these conference presentations. Further, the book provides some answers to questions such as what makes a good growth model? What criteria should be used in evaluating growth models? How should outputs from growth models be utilized? How auxiliary teacher information could be utilized to improve value added? How multiple sources of student information could be accumulated to estimate teacher effectiveness? Whether student-level and school-level covariates should be included? And what are the impacts of the potential heterogeneity of teacher effects across students of different aptitudes or other differing characteristics on growth modeling and teacher evaluation? Overall, this book addresses reliability and validity issues in growth modeling and value added modeling and presents the latest development in this area. In addition, some persistent issues have been approached from a new perspective. This edited volume provides a very good source of information related to the current explorations in student growth and teacher effectiveness evaluation.

The Race To The Top program strongly advocates the use of computer technology in assessments. It dramatically promotes computer-based testing, linear or adaptive, in K-12 state assessment programs. Moreover, assessment requirements driven by this federal initiative exponentially increase the complexity in assessment design and test development. This book provides readers with a review of the history and basics of computer-based tests. It also offers a macro perspective for designing such assessment systems in the K-12 setting as well as a micro perspective on new challenges such as innovative items, scoring of such items, cognitive diagnosis, and vertical scaling for growth modeling and value added approaches to assessment. The editors' goal is to provide readers with necessary information to create a smarter computer-based testing system by following the advice and experience of experts from education as well as other industries. This book is based on a conference (http://marces.org/workshop.htm) held by the Maryland Assessment Research Center for Education Success. It presents multiple perspectives including test vendors and state departments of education, in designing and implementing a computer-based test in the K-12 setting. The design and implementation of such a system requires deliberate planning and thorough considerations. The advice and experiences presented in this book serve as a guide to practitioners and as a good source of information for quality control. The technical issues discussed in this book are relatively new and unique to K-12 large-scale computer-based testing programs, especially due to the recent federal policy. Several chapters provide possible solutions to psychometricians dealing with the technical challenges related to innovative items, cognitive diagnosis, and growth modeling in computer-based linear or adaptive tests in the K-12 setting.