Arie van der Ploeg

The Impact of Indiana’s System of Interim Assessments on Mathematics and Reading Achievement

Interim assessments are increasingly common in U.S. schools. We use high-quality data from a large-scale school-level cluster randomized experiment to examine the impact of two well-known commercial interim assessment programs on mathematics and reading achievement in Indiana. Results indicate that the treatment effects are positive but not consistently significant. The treatment effects are smaller in lower grades (i.e., kindergarten to second grade) and larger in upper grades (i.e., third to eighth grade). Significant treatment effects are detected in Grades 3 to 8, especially in third- and fourth-grade reading and in fifth- and sixth-grade mathematics.

Measuring Instructional Differentiation in a Large-Scale Experiment

This study operationalizes four measures of instructional differentiation: one for Grade 2 English language arts (ELA), one for Grade 2 mathematics, one for Grade 5 ELA, and one for Grade 5 mathematics. Our study evaluates their measurement properties of each measure in a large field experiment: the Indiana Diagnostic Assessment Tools Study, which included two consecutive cluster randomized trials (CRTs) of the effects of interim assessments on student achievement. Each log was designed to measure instructional practices as they were implemented for eight randomly selected students in the participating teachers’ classrooms. A total of 592 teachers from 127 schools took part in this study. Logs were administered 16 times in each experiment. Item responses to the logs were scaled using the Rasch model and reliability estimates for the differentiation measures were evaluated at the log level (observations within teachers), the teacher level, and the school level. Estimated reliability was above .70 for each of the log- and teacher-level measures. At the school level, reliability estimates were lower for Grade 5 ELA and mathematics. The variance between teachers and schools on the scaled differentiation measures was substantially less than within-teacher variation. These results provide preliminary evidence that teacher instructional logs may provide useful measures of instructional differentiation in elementary grades at multiple levels of aggregation.

Effects of Interim Assessments on Student Achievement: Evidence From a Large-Scale Experiment

ABSTRACT We use data from a large-scale, school-level randomized experiment conducted in 2010–2011 in public schools in Indiana. Our sample includes more than 30,000 students in 70 schools. We examine the impact of two interim assessment programs (i.e., mCLASS in Grades K–2 and Acuity in Grades 3–8) on mathematics and reading achievement. Two-level models were used to capture the nesting in the data. Results indicate that the treatment effect is insignificant in Grades 3–8, and thus students in treatment schools perform as well as students in control schools. In contrast, the treatment effect is negative and significant in Grades K–2 (i.e., kindergarten and second grade), indicating that students in control schools perform higher than students in treatment schools.

Effects of Interim Assessments Across the Achievement Distribution Evidence From an Experiment

We use data from a large-scale experiment conducted in Indiana in 2009-2010 to examine the impact of two interim assessment programs (mCLASS and Acuity) across the mathematics and reading achievement distributions. Specifically, we focus on whether the use of interim assessments has a particularly strong effect on improving outcomes for low achievers. Quantile regression is used to estimate treatment effects across the entire achievement distribution (i.e., provide estimates in the lower, middle, or upper tails). Results indicate that in Grades 3 to 8 (particularly third, fifth, and sixth) lower achievers seem to benefit more from interim assessments than higher achieving students.