This guide attempts to address an aspect of secondary CTE (Career and Technical Education) that has received little attention; the assessment literacy of educators. School leaders need to go beyond ensuring routine compliance with external and internal regulatory forces to identify ways in which CTE program teachers might better understand…

Examines four factors involved in the determination of how many test items should be constructed or sampled for a set of objectives: (1) the type of decision to be made with results, (2) importance of objectives, (3) number of objectives, and (4) practical constraints. Specific guidelines that teachers and evaluators can use and an illustrative…

How criterion-referenced tests can be used in program and curriculum evaluations is discussed. Topics include: understanding program/curriculum environments, determining an appropriate evaluation model, and standards for determining a CRT's and an evaluation's quality. Five instructional steps are outlined, and an annotated bibliography and a…

The subject of constructing criterion-referenced tests is often researched, but many technical problems remain to be satisfactorily resolved. Foremost, criterion-referenced test developers need a comprehensive set of steps for construction. In this paper, 14 logical steps for building criterion-referenced tests that refer to several different…

The relationship between instruction and a test is defined as a parallel content-valid relation. This article describes the PLANA procedure, which approaches the problem of content validity by applying constructional rules for producing or judging the content validity relationship between the instructional objective and the items. (BW)

This booklet briefly describes the potentials and problems of different ways of assessing the short-term impact of early childhood Title I (ECT-I) programs. It is intended for education officials and evaluators who already know something of Title I evaluation, but who may not be familiar with the special issues involved in evaluation of early…

Attention is drawn to the dynamics of criterion-referenced test (CRT) construction in this report. How CRT's are developed at the Instructional Objectives Exchange is described through a series of three steps. The procedures pertain to the construction of "off the shelf" as well as "customized" tests. Step one, isolating the…

The article presents guidelines for transforming information from conventional testing into data useful in classroom instruction of exceptional students. Steps are described first for converting a norm referenced test to instructionally relevant information, and second, for applying, rescoring, and summarizing results of the criterion referenced…

The Nevada Criterion Referenced Tests (CRT) mandated by legislation are designed to provide a means of measuring student academic achievement and proficiency in the Nevada State Content and Performance Standards. This review guide is intended to be used by teachers and administrators as a tool to complement current efforts at preparing students…

Reports on the effort by the National Teacher Examination to set standards in the field of speech communication. Describes the way in which the examination is put together and discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of such a method. (KEH)

This manual, part of a long-range planning model concerning goal formulations, is a revision and update of an earlier work on writing educational performance objectives (ED 073 529). It modifies and extends the former manual to provide the total system description necessary for curriculum development as well as curriculum implementation. The first…

Describes an attempt to construct an ESL dictation test that would: (1) be appropriate for a wide range of ability, (2) be easy and fast to score, (3) consist of set items that would form both a unidimensional and cumulative scale, and (4) yield scores that would be directly interpretable with respect to specified levels of English proficiency.…

A dozen different approaches that yield 13 reliability indices for criterion-referenced tests were identified and grouped into three categories: threshold loss function, squared-error loss function, and domain score estimation. Indices were evaluated within each category. (Author/RL)

Discusses the construction and use of criterion-referenced student feedback instruments which make specific reference to course objectives and allow the instructor to determine student perceptions on how well these objectives are achieved. (RAO)

This book presents a compilation of 28 issues of the newsletter, "How To Evaluate Education Programs" from the first one published in September 1977 through the issue of December 1979 on the topic of evaluating educational programs. The subject is covered in the following chapters: (1) How to Choose a Test; (2) How to Rate and Compare…