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It has long been argued that U.S. states' differential performance on nationwide assessments may reflect differences in students' opportunity to learn the tested content that is primarily due to variation in curricular content standards, rather than in instructional quality or educational investment. To quantify the effect of differences in states' intended curricular goals on test item performance in the mid-to-late 2000s, we use fractional logit regression of state-specific mathematics item difficulty values on a measure of content emphasis in state elementary school mathematics curricular standards documents. Finding weak but positive associations between content emphasis in state standards and proportion-correct item difficulty, we conclude that variations in states' intended curriculum content, alone, appear to have had limited influence on cross-state mathematics test item performance during the time frame examined. Implications for cross-state assessment are discussed.

Variation in test performance among examinees from different regions or national jurisdictions is often partially attributed to differences in the degree of content correspondence between local school or training program curricula, and the test of interest. This posited relationship between test-curriculum correspondence, or "alignment," and test performance is usually inferred from highly distal evidence, rather than directly examined. Utilizing mathematics standards content analysis data and achievement test item data from ten U.S. states, we examine the relationship between topic-specific alignment and test item performance. When a particular item's content type is emphasized by the standards, we find evidence of a positive relationship between the alignment measure and proportion-correct test item difficulty, although this effect is not consistent across samples. Implications of the results for curricular achievement test development and score interpretation are discussed.