Our
Projects
This page highlights some of my recent work. Please see my CV for a complete list of peer-reviewed publications, professional reports, conference presentations, and preprints.
Student, S.R., Briggs, D.C. and L. Davis (in press). Growth across grades and common item grade alignment in vertical scaling using the Rasch model. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.
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Investigates how year-to-year growth estimated from a vertical scale using the Rasch model can change drastically depending solely on the grade level of the common items used to link the scale.
Student, S.R. (2024). Growth on 2019 state achievement tests: Empirical benchmarks and the role of scale choice. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. Advance online publication.
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Introduces new empirical benchmarks for annual growth on large-scale state tests, as well as guidance on how the design of vertical scales affects the magnitude of these growth estimates.
Student, S. R. (2022). Vertical scales, deceleration, and empirical benchmarks for growth. Educational Researcher. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221105873
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A review article connecting the evaluation literature on effect size translation to the psychometric literature on vertical scaling.
Student, S. R., & Gong, B. (2022). Supporting the interpretive validity of student-level claims in science assessment with tiered claim structures. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12523
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Proposes a validity and validation framework for making sense of scores on large-scale tests in complex domains like the Next Generation Science Standards.
Student, S. R. (2022). Appraising traditional and purpose-built person fit statistics’ power to detect cheating. Chinese-English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation, 3(1). https://www.ce-jeme.org/journal/vol3/iss1/3
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Investigates the extent to which IRT and nonparametric person fit statistics can flag cheating based on item preknowledge when other types of atypical responding like guessing and creative responding are also present.