Gender differences in achievement test performance at the college level were studied as part of the initial analysis of the recently developed Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP)--an achievement test battery for use in higher education. The CAAP was pilot tested in fall 1988 and includes a measure of writing proficiency and four…

A test of job-specific literacy, called the McCoy Assessment of Worksite Literacy Abilities (MAWSLA), could not predict the job success of the 100 employees who took it. The 108-item test was based on literary tasks encountered by employees in the course of a routine day at McCoy Electronics Company, a 560-employee firm in Pennsylvania. The…

In response to the tradition of examining a new test's validity by comparing it with a well-established multiple-choice test, a study investigated whether multiple-choice tests with one right answer can measure the reading comprehension process as defined by constructivists. The study compared the information obtained from two different…

Working on the assumptions that person, strategy, and task are essential metacognitive variables for explaining effective learning and that a reader's metacognitive knowledge about his or her strengths and limitations necessarily influences the types of strategies applied to different tasks, investigators studied the degree to which seventh and…

To support the construct validity of a locally developed, sixth grade reading achievement test, an investigation of factorial invariance was made across 1556 majority, 327 Black minority, and 136 Asian minority examinees. Although the hypothesis of a unidimensional factor pattern was retained for each group, hypotheses of equal factor weights…

This paper provides school personnel with a practical outline for selecting an appropriate standardized achievement battery by describing the test selection procedures developed by a large metropolitan school system. The system needed a new achievement test battery which would reflect recent curriculum changes and provide for grade level testing.…

In discussing the third national assessment of reading and literature, four major points can be made. First, norm-referenced tests and criterion-referenced tests ignore serious ethical and measurement problems, namely, we don't know enough about individual differences to do such testing and the outcome, social class tracking, is ethically…

The "back to basics" movement raises questions regarding the nature of reading that is assumed in instruction and testing. Of the three definitions of reading (decoding, meaning-from-page, and intellectual processes) the latter view, which sees reading as a broad range of perceptual, associative, and cognitive elements, is preferred. The…

Researchers tested 136 third through sixth graders with the reading subtests of the "Iowa Test of Basic Skills," reading tests constructed from appropriate graded reading materials, and an oral cloze test constructed from a short story whose language resembled the oral language of the children. They computed correlations (within each grade level)…

Various operational definitions of test bias are discussed including those which involve rater judgment, statistical methods which use an external criterion, and statistical methods in which no external criterion is used. It is concluded that the Rasch model provides a theoretically acceptable method for detecting item bias. The Rasch Model is…

The general purposes of this study were to investigate the factorial validity of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS), Reading Comprehension subtest, and to study the item difficulties in order to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses of sixth and seventh grade Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I students. A sample of…

This study examined the effect of two ways of question phrasing as related to three styles of expository writing on the test performance of elementary school children. Multiple-choice questions were developed for sets of passages which were written using three different syntactic structures; and which had different levels of difficulty. The…

The relationship between performance on various Piagetian and reading achievement tasks as examined through 26 correlational studies is reviewed. The following areas of concern are addressed: (1) sample characteristics of the subjects; (2) classification of the Piagetian tasks into five categories of logical operations, spatial concepts, general…

The Reading Progress Scale (RPS) was administered to 4,714 students from 46 courses ranging from accounting to welding at Lansing Community College in two studies conducted from fall 1975 to spring 1976. The scale which assesses reading skills sought to answer two research questions: (1) is the RPS a good indicator of student persistence in a…

The purpose of this review is to report an analysis of recent research related to measurement of attitudes in reading. It is based on a search of the literature published primarily since the late 1960's. The emphasis is on research related to attitudinal measuring tools rather than the results of research utilizing such tools. The review is…