This report describes the procedures of a systemwide testing program established by the Ottawa, Ontario, education board to evaluate high school student performance in selected courses. The project was initiated in response to a directive from trustees, who were concerned about variation of academic standards among students in relation to…

Three common policies used by English departments in Kuwait universities to accommodate the students in appropriate course types and levels are discussed and compared from a practical perspective. The three policies are concerned with placement tests and remedial courses and are intended to: (1) place students with high scores on the standardized…

A state-mandated outcomes assessment test for certification of teachers has been administered in Texas since 1986. At Southwest Texas State University, which produces the most certified teachers in the state, the assessment showed that its students were not also among the best. In response to this situation, a presidential committee conducted…

A formative evaluation of a pilot review and appeal process for the Maryland Writing Test (MWT) is described. The MWT is a large-scale direct assessment of writing. A three-year pilot phase was to culminate in the implementation of an operational procedure for the review and appeal of scores impacting a pass/fail decision for examinees. The MWT…

The purpose of this paper is to report on the processes followed and the modifications made to the Alabama state minimum competency testing program for exceptional students, as well as to provide results for exceptional students tested through spring 1985. A committee of lay citizens and professional educators identified basic competencies in…

Sixty college students from classes in educational measurement were divided into two groups. Each group was administered the same criterion test except that one group received feedback after every item and the other received no feedback. The students were also divided into three ability levels. Each test item was classified two ways; by item…

Arguments in support of standardized testing are critically analyzed. Usual criticisms of such tests are summarized as relatively unimportant. However, two basic criticisms are offered: the competitive nature of scoring standardized tests and their lack of content validity. The test-makers contention that tests are neutral and simply need to be…

Scores on mental ability and academic skills for 1958 and 1978 of representative sample of grade 4 and 7 classes in Saskatchewan were compared. The selected students were administered appropriate levels of the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Tests, and the Canadian Tests of Basic skills in vocabulary, reading, language skills (spelling, capitalization,…

The problems associated with misclassifying students when pass-fail decisions are based on test scores are discussed. One protection against misclassification is to set a confidence interval around the cutting score. Those whose scores fall above the interval are passed; those whose scores fall below the interval are failed; and those whose scores…

An updated version of Taba's 1966 "Social Studies Inference Test" and "Application of Principles Test" for elementary students is studied. The original tests measured students' abilities to generalize and draw inferences from short paragraphs containing data relevant to social studies. The "Social Studies Inference…

The Follow Through experience is beginning to provide compelling evidence bearing upon important policy issues in compensatory education. This evidence, coming as it does from a naturalistic quasi-experiment, cannot draw its plausibility from the conventional statistical inference appropriate to probabilistically-constructed true experiments. The…

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…

This paper reports the results of a management study of the effectiveness of middle schools in a large, urban, midwestern public school system. Results of the study illustrate the conundrum that all educational reforms are not complementary, i.e., they are at cross-purposes because they are designed to obtain different outcomes. The two reform…

The effects of overall attendance at parent conferences on Title I student's standardized test scores were studied in the Dallas (Texas) Public Schools. Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVA's) were conducted to investigate the effect of overall attendance on students' standardized test scores, and Cohen's "f" statistics were used as an index…

This study examined the impact of students' background characteristics (English language proficiency) on the level of effectiveness of various types of testing accommodations. Data were collected from 946 eighth graders, some of whom were English language learners. Four accommodation strategies were used: (1) modified (simplified) English language…