How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be well, complicated.

Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, "Measuring Up" demystifies educational testing from MCAS to SAT to WAIS, with all the alphabet soup in between. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Daniel Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education. He walks readers through everyday examples to show what tests do well, what their limits are, how easily tests and scores can be oversold or misunderstood, and how they can be used sensibly to help discover how much kids have learned.

Clarifies the primary questions raised by the use of value-added models (VAM) for measuring teacher effects, reviews the most important recent applications of VAM, and discusses statistical and measurement issues associated with VAM. Does value-added modeling (VAM) demonstrate the importance of teachers to student outcomes? The authors clarify the primary questions raised by VAM for measuring teacher effects, review the most important recent applications of VAM, and discuss a variety of statistical and measurement issues that might affect the validity of VAM inferences. The authors identify numerous possible sources of error and bias in teacher effects and recommend a number of steps for future research into these potential errors.