This paper is an overview of some points made at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April of 1987. Gender effects were computed on 82 nationally standardized tests designed to determine precocity among youth. The effect sizes ranged from a magnitude of 0.50 (favoring females) for spelling in grade 12 on the…

The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) members' expectations of teacher and student attitudes toward standardized testing are compared with the actual attitudes of these groups to ascertain whether the perceptions of test specialists are similar to those of test users. Of a random sample of NCME members, assigned systematically to…

In a real sense, PISA 2003 has touched the mathematics education community by stealth rather than by storm. Although PISA brings "baggage" commonly associated with international assessments, it takes some refreshing perspectives especially in the way that it envisions and assesses mathematical literacy. In this panel discussion we focus…

This paper identifies and assesses key ideas in data analysis (or statistics) that should be at the focus of middle school mathematics instruction. Items that can be used to assess some of the complex objectives of data analysis are located. The search includes a collection of items released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress…

The concurrent validity of standardized achievement tests (the Stanford 9 and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) was examined using data from different school districts nationwide and a latent variable modeling approach. Items in the standardized achievement tests in several content areas were divided into parcels. Parcel scores were used to create…

This paper summarizes well-reviewed research about teacher competence in the skills described in the "Standards for Teacher Competence in the Educational Assessment of Students." It also examines additional research studies from 1990 to the present. The standards emphasize: choosing and developing assessment methods appropriate for…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects self-assessment on kindergarten students learning of high frequency words. The sample consisted of 30 randomly selected kindergarten students. The students were then randomly assigned to a control group or experimental group. The experimental group used self-assessment method to learn high…

Literature relating summarization skills to reading improvement and to test score gains is reviewed, and two new studies are reported. One study compared gain on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) of two groups of students, one (n=7 students) receiving instruction in summarizing skills and the other (n=14) receiving TOEFL…

One hundred and sixty male high school students, half of them Mexican-American and half Anglo, were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT), and Bender Gestalt. Half of each ethnic group was classified by the public schools as learning disabled and half were in regular classes. The WAIS Verbal,…

A longitudinal study of achievement data from public schools in Durham County, North Carolina, was undertaken to examine individual growth curves as well as to chart the progress of educational institutions and the effects of aggregation on the study of growth. A two-level hierarchical linear model was used in the study to specify individual…

In order to test claims made regarding the Degrees of Reading Power Test (DRP), a study posed two research questions: (1) How well does the DRP correlate with the more venerable Stanford Achievement Test (SAT)? and (2) How well do these instruments predict students' academic classroom achievement? Three hundred sixty-nine students from two middle…

The study compared performance of very low birthweight (VLBW) children at 5 years of age who were enrolled in regular preschool and kindergarten classes with matched classmate controls on cognitive measures and teacher rated classroom behavior. Outcome measures included the Slosson Intelligence Test, Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration,…

The career of Stuart Appleton Courtis in the growth of testing and educational measurement parallels the development of progressive education in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1909 he developed the standardized Courtis Arithmetic Test, Series A, the first objective test used in any city public schools. Continuing his work in testing,…

Testing practices have come under considerable scrutiny and criticism in recent years. Testing practices in the Federal government have certainly not been immune from this movement as the use of standardized written tests for selection purposes has been increasingly under attack. The most recent attacks have focused on implications or findings of…

Arthur Jensen has argued that genetic differences in abstract reasoning ability, not cultural bias in the test item, are the causes of differences in standardized test performance between American Blacks and Whites. He used a study by Frank McGurk to support his argument. McGurk's study used test items judged most cultural or least cultural. These…