Assessment & Evaluation Methods Flashcards

A principal wants to assess whether teacher-assigned grades accurately reflect student mastery of TEKS. The most direct way to evaluate this alignment is to:

Answer: Compare teacher grades to students' STAAR performance data

Comparing classroom grades to objective external measures like STAAR results reveals whether grading practices accurately reflect standards mastery or are influenced by other factors.

Under the Texas Principal Standards, principals are expected to use multiple data sources to improve campus performance. Which combination best represents a balanced data system?

Answer: STAAR scores, attendance data, and teacher observation data

A balanced data system includes academic performance (STAAR), engagement (attendance), and instructional quality (observations) to capture a comprehensive picture of campus health.

A Texas principal receives a campus STAAR report showing strong aggregate scores but a persistent performance gap for African American students. The principal's ethical obligation under the Closing the Gaps domain requires:

Answer: Setting specific, measurable targets to eliminate the achievement gap for that subgroup

Equity-centered leadership requires principals to set explicit goals and implement targeted strategies to close documented achievement gaps for specific student subgroups.

A campus conducts a program evaluation of its after-school tutoring program. To determine program effectiveness, the evaluator should measure student outcomes:

Answer: Before and after the program using comparable pre- and post-measures

Pre- and post-measures allow evaluators to calculate a learning gain attributable to the program, which is more informative than post-test only or process data alone.

Which term describes an assessment's ability to consistently measure the same construct across different test administrations, scorers, or item sets?

Answer: Reliability

Reliability refers to the consistency of assessment results across administrations, raters, or equivalent forms of the same test.

A school's MTSS team is selecting a progress monitoring tool for Tier 2 reading students. The most critical technical characteristic to verify is:

Answer: Sufficient sensitivity to detect small increments of student growth over short intervals

Progress monitoring tools must be sensitive enough to detect small gains over short periods (e.g., bi-weekly), which requires strong technical properties like adequate slope variance.

A campus administrator is presenting STAAR data to the campus improvement committee. To make the data actionable, the presentation should include:

Answer: Performance by TEKS reporting category with year-over-year trend comparisons

Presenting data by TEKS reporting category with trend comparisons helps teams identify specific skill gaps and track whether interventions are producing improvement over time.