ABSTRACT
Educational policy debates often involve questions about whether students are improving in key academic subject areas, such as reading and mathematics, or whether children in one country are learning as much as those in other nations, or what associations exist between demographic, curriculum, and instructional factors and academic achievement. An important source of data for such discussions are national and cross-national assessments such as the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], n.d.-a), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA; Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development [OECD], n.d.), and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS; International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement [IEA], 2011). Mazzeo et al. (2006) used the term group-score assessments in referring to such surveys to emphasize the fact that data regarding groups of people are the main outcomes of such assessments, not subsidiary by-products as is the case with more familiar educational and psychological tests used for the evaluation of individuals.
