Number sense development of 411 middle‐ and low‐income kindergartners (mean age 5.8 years) was examined over 4 time points while controlling for gender, age, and reading skill. Although low‐income children performed significantly worse than middle‐income children at the end of kindergarten on all tasks, both groups progressed at about the same rate. An exception was story problems, on which the low‐income group achieved at a slower rate; both income groups made comparable progress when the same problems were presented nonverbally with visual referents. Holding other predictors constant, there were small but reliable gender effects favoring boys on overall number sense performance as well as on nonverbal calculation. Using growth mixture modeling, 3 classes of growth trajectories in number sense emerged.

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The past ten years have witnessed an explosion in the use of interim assessments by school districts across the country. A primary reason for this rapid growth is the assumption that interim assessments can inform and improve instructional practice and thereby contribute to increased student achievement. Testing companies, states, and districts have become invested in selling or creating interim assessments and data management systems designed to help teachers, principals, and district leaders make sense of student data, identify areas of strengths and weaknesses, identify instructional strategies for targeted students, and much more. Districts are keeping their interim tests even under pressure to cut budgets (Sawchuk, 2009). The U.S. Department of Education is using its Race to the Top program to encourage school districts to develop formative or interim assessments as part of comprehensive state assessment systems.Much of the rhetoric around interim assessments paints a rosy picture, often with the ultimate claim that such measures will lead to increased student achievement. Much of the belief in the potential of interim assessments to improve student learning comes from the growing body of research on formative assessment. However, the majority of this research has not focused on interim assessments themselves, but rather practices that are embedded within classroom instruction. Very few studies exist on how interim assessments are actually used, by individual teachers in classrooms, by principals, and by districts. Furthermore, we know little about how teachers and other educators use the results from such assessments, the conditions that support their ability to use these data to improve instruction, or the interaction of interim assessments with other classroom assessment practices. Our study begins to fill that vacuum. Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Educational Administration and

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) unites seven of the nation's leading research institutions to improve elementary and secondary education through research on policy, finance, school reform, and school governance. Members of CPRE are the University of Pennsylvania, Teachers College Columbia University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Northwestern University.CPRE is currently examining how alternative approaches to education reform--such as new accountability policies, teacher compensation, whole-school reform approaches, and efforts to contract out instructional services--address issues of coherence, incentives and capacity. The results of this research are shared with policymakers, educators, practitioners, and other interested individuals and organizations in order to promote improvements in policy design and implementation.Want to learn more about new and upcoming CPRE publications, project research findings, or where CPRE researchers are presenting? Please visit our Web site at http://www.cpre.org or sign up for our e-newsletter, In-Sites, at insites@gse.upenn.edu. CPRE Research Report SeriesResearch Reports are issued by CPRE to facilitate the exchange of ideas among policymakers, practitioners, and researchers who share an interest in education policy. The views expressed in the reports are those of individual authors, and are not necessarily shared by CPRE, or its institutional partners.For more information, visit our website www.cpre.org, or call us at (215) 573-0700. Consortium for Policy Research in EducationUniversity of Pennsylvania | Teachers College | Harvard University | Stanford University | University of Michigan | University of WisconsinMadison | Northwestern University From Testing to Teaching: The Use of Interim Assessments in Classroom InstructionBy Margaret E. Goertz Leslie Nabors Oláh Matthew Riggan CPRE Research Report # RR-65Our research was funded by a National Science Foundation grant (#REC-0529485) to the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). Opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the study districts, CPRE, or its institutional members. December 2009Copyright 2010 by Margaret E. Goertz, Leslie Nabors Oláh, and Matthew Riggan About the AuthorsMargaret E. Goertz is co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and a professor of education policy in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn GSE). She specializes in the study of state and federal education finance and governance policy. She has conducted extensive research on state education reform policies, state teacher policies, and state and federal programs for special-needs students. Her current research activities look at the impact of standards-based reform in elementary schools and high schools, the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and state and ...

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