This commentary provides an external perspective on NASP's first public report on racial and ethnic differences in Praxis outcomes. These data demonstrate racial disparities in pass rates but do not provide information regarding the causes of these disparities. This report underscores the need for expanded public reporting of Praxis data in order…

This issue's featured article, "Assessment and Learning: Fields Apart" (Baird, Andrich, Hopfenbeck, and Stobart 2017) raises issues that are of basic importance for the disciplines of assessment and teaching and learning theory. In this commentary, Alex Scharaschkin restricts his remarks to a few areas. He considers the idea of a…

Drawing on a sociocultural perspective on educational assessment the empirical examples of Margareta Serder and Anders Jakobsson serve as a starting point for a critical analysis of PISA and the image of science education it perpetuates. While PISA claims to neutrally measure competencies relevant to science education, I argue that the test…

This commentary argues that the OET research raises inescapable contradictions in trying to separate "language" from "communication" within a weak performance test and advocates for reconceptualizing the legitimate domain of "language" more widely, reclaiming the full potential of the communicative competence…

As pressure builds to assess students, teachers, and schools, educational practitioners and policy makers are increasingly looking toward student perception surveys as a promising means to collect high-quality, useful data. For instance, the widely cited Measures of Effective Teaching study lists student perception surveys as one of the three key…

Flynn wrote a book devoted to the Flynn effect, featuring his theoretical explanation of why the intelligence of worldwide populations has apparently increased from generation to generation. The essence of his theorizing is that because of the societal impact of scientific technology, people of today are much more guided by abstract, rather than…

Although the United States has had a language requirement for citizenship (through the naturalization process) since the first decade of the 20th century, very little research and discussion has taken place in academic circles about this requirement, which has been enforced for the past two decades through a test and testing practice to which…

Lissitz and Samuelsen (2007) propose a new framework for conceptualizing test validity that separates analysis of test properties from analysis of the construct measured. In response, the author of this article reviews fundamental characteristics of test validity, drawing largely from seminal writings as well as from the accepted standards. He…

Lissitz and Samuelsen (2007) propose a new framework for validity theory and terminology, emphasizing a shift in theory and practice toward issues of test content rather than constructs. The author of this article argues that several of Lissitz and Samuelsen's critiques of validity theory focus on previously considered, but subsequently discarded,…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…