Assessment

National Reporting System for Adult Education
The web site for information, resources and training relating to the National Reporting System (NRS).

American Institutes for Research
Founded in 1946, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a not-for-profit corporation providing the adult education community with tools necessary to determine and incorporate effective practices, and affording adult education stakeholders information on policy, research findings, and initiatives in the field.

Shifting to Adaptive Testing 

Michelle R. Davis
This article covers the impacts and questions raised about adaptive computer testing that individualizes tests for learners with disabilities.

Formative Assessment Action Plan: Creating a Formative Assessment System
Nancy Frey and Douglas Fischer
Step by step guides to lesson plan structure and keys to help students learn better and independently.

A Process Guide for Establishing State Adult Education Content Standards
This Adult Education Content Standard guide describes the steps to plan, develop, review, and implement a fully integrated, standards-based education system to improve instruction and increase learner outcomes.

RubiStar
RubiStar is a free, web-based tool that allows teachers to develop customized rubrics for use in evaluating student performance.

The Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning
The findings of the longitudinal study represents adults who when the study started were age 18-44, residents of the Portland (Oregon) metropolitan area, proficient but not necessarily native speakers of English, who did not have a high school diploma or GED and were not in high school.

The Adult Reading Components Study
On this website, 569 Adult Basic Education (ABE) learners from the ARCS are grouped into 11 profiles. Each profile group shows a distinctive pattern and/or level of reading component skills. You will learn more about profiles as you navigate the site via the two tracks described.

The Lexile Framework for Reading
The Lexile Framework evaluates both reading ability and text complexity on the same scale. Unlike other systems, the Lexile Framework uses assessment results to match readers with texts essential for growth and monitor their progress toward standards.

The Reading Demonstration
This video represents an informal assessment to capture what low-literate learners can and cannot do with literacy. The test administrator (Heide) presents a number of products that students are likely to be familiar with and invites the student to read what she can of the print. Products include a soft drink can, advertisements, bills, lottery ticket, and other environmental print. Students are also asked to read a short passage in their native language in order to get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses in decoding and fluency. Short paragraphs in English are read together with the student and the meaning of the passage is discussed. At the end of the video, Heide provides a short interpretation of the student's literacy skills.