Clinical judgment has become an increasingly important aspect of modern health service professionals. To ensure public safety, licensure exams must go beyond assessing only knowledge and skills when evaluating entry-level professions to evaluating clinical judgment. This importance necessitates licensure and certification examinations in these…

Foreign language aptitude is defined as one's potential to learn a second language. A language learner with higher aptitude is predicted to learn more, faster, and reach a higher level of proficiency. If this is the case, one way to validate the construct of aptitude and its measure is to conduct a validation study in which measures of aptitude is…

This article attempts to present emotioncy as a potential source of test bias to inform the analysis of test item performance. Emotioncy is defined as a hierarchy, ranging from "exvolvement" (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) to "involvement" (inner and arch), to emphasize the emotions evoked by the senses. This study…

Introduction: This exploratory study determined whether transcribing selected test items on an adult life and work skills reading test into braille could maintain the same approximate scale-score range and maintain fitness within the item response theory model as used by the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment Systems (CASAS) for developing…

The Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification (CRCC) has taken a proactive stance on perceived test inequities of the Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (CRC) exam as it relates to people who are prelingually deaf and hard of hearing. This article describes the process developed and implemented by the CRCC to help maximize test equity…

An accurately calibrated item bank is essential for a valid computerized adaptive test. However, in some settings, such as occupational testing, there is limited access to test takers for calibration. As a result of the limited access to possible test takers, collecting data to accurately calibrate an item bank in an occupational setting is…

This study investigated the effects of item position on the stability of item parameters for items used on a large-scale, national certification examination and the resulting impact on examinee performance. Participants in this study included individuals from a large, chain restaurant who completed a nationally accredited food safety examination.…

Educational achievement is a very important issue for parents, teachers, and the government. An accurate measurement plays a very important role in evaluating achievement fairly, and, therefore, analysis methods have been developed considerably in recent years. Education based on long-time learning processes forms a fruitful base for item tests,…

Multiple factors have influenced testing agencies to more carefully consider the manner and frequency in which pretest item data are collected and analyzed. One potentially promising development is judges' estimates of item difficulty. Accurate estimates of item difficulty may be used to reduce pretest samples sizes, supplement insufficient…

The main requisite for a functional computerized adaptive testing system is the need of a calibrated item bank. This text presents the tasks carried out during the calibration of an item bank for assessing knowledge of Basque language. It has been done in terms of the 3-parameter logistic model provided by the item response theory. Besides, this…

Federal regulations allow up to 2% of the student population of a state to achieve proficiency for adequate yearly progress by taking an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAS). Such tests are likely to be easier, but as long as a test is considered a valid measure of grade level content, it is allowable as…

This paper presents the assessment and item specifications for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2009 mathematics assessment. "Chapter Two" contains descriptions of the five major content areas of mathematics (Number Properties and Operations, Measurement, Geometry, Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability, and…

There are few certifying or recertifying examinations in the medical field that are given in a take-home format. This stems from a concern that examinees may discuss items with peers, or save copies of items on the exam and then pass them on to others. This study examined if item exposure on take-home examinations influences the difficulty of the…

Lifelong learning has become an important goal of education over the last decade. According to the United States Department of Education (2001), nearly 3 million students over age 17 (excluding those institutionalized) enrolled in adult basic education, adult secondary education, or English as a second language classes in the United States.…