Project Summary

The New England Compact (NEC) contracted with The Education Alliance to conduct evaluations of the process and outcome components of NEC's two Enhanced Assessment Instruments (EAI) grants funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

NEC was formed in 2002, by the Commissioners of Education in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, as a cross-state consortium with a mission to provide a forum for NEC states to address issues arising from the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. Focusing on development and implementation of grade level expectations and the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), a state assessment based on those expectations that is now used across 3 of the 4 NEC states, the NEC helped its states explore strategies, share knowledge, and establish cross-state activities whose economies of scale and cost-efficiency benefited each state by allowing leverage of resources.

In 2005, the Alliance completed the Enhanced Assessment Program Evaluation, an evaluation of NEC grant activities that established a set of common, priority standards termed "common expectations" in ELA and mathematics in grades 3-8 and high schools across the NEC states, and created a NEC test blueprint, based on common expectations across NEC states, that would be used to cooperatively develop grade-level assessments in reading and math.

In 2007, the Alliance completed an evaluation of the NEC's second EAI grant, TMAS: Reaching Students in the Gaps, a project that sought to increase knowledge and understanding of students who do not achieve standards on state large-scale assessment systems. Research studies were conducted by the NEC that included pilot testing of a task assessment module, and surveys and interviews with teachers across the NEC states regarding students in the gap.

The Education Alliance contributed to the reports (see below) from the TMAS project.

See also:

• "Lessons Learned" (pdf)
• "Teacher views of students in the gaps" report (pdf)
• "They come to the test, and there is nothing to fold": Teacher views of large-scale assessments and classroom context report (pdf)