The SCOPE Mathematics Achievement Test booklet for grade 6 presents 12 mathematical concepts with instructions for students to take the test with little or no teacher direction. Testing items are: dividing with remainder, up to a six digit dividend by a three digit divisor; using correct order of operations in three-step problems; applying…

The differences in responses of grade 6 boys and girls to selected items on a standardized test are examined. Data are the responses of approximately 36,000 children during 1978-79 to two test forms of the California Assessment Program's Survey of Basic Skills: Grade 6 (SBS:6). Performance on specific arithmetic items is studied and involves the…

This study added extraneous information and increased syntactical complexity to determine the relative importance of computational and reading abilities in solving arithmetic word problems. Analyzing tests of 200 sixth graders indicated the combined abilities accounted for 54 percent of the variance in solution accuracy. (BS)

A study of the context effects on item parameters for one- and three-parameter latent trait models showed that: (1) changes in context affected their item difficulties; and (2) context effects were more important in making predictions for single items than for groups of items. (Author/RL)

Sixth-grade teachers (n=26) estimated item performance for their students (724 total students) on a 50-item district-wide science test. Teachers were more accurate in estimating performance of the total group than of the borderline group, but in neither case was their accuracy high. Estimating proportion-correct values using the Angoff standard…

The Test for Inquiry Social Studies (TISS) is a 40-item multiple-choice instrument designed to measure the application of either inquiry social studies or higher-level cognitive thinking skills in fifth and sixth graders. The test can generally be completed in 40 to 50 minutes. This administrator's guide contains information on the reliability,…

Studied the ability of logical test design (LTD) to predict student performance in reading Roman numerals for 211 sixth graders in Mexico City tested on Roman numeral items varying on LTD-related and non-LTD-related variables. The LTD-related variable item iterativity was found to be the best predictor of item difficulty. (SLD)

An assessment analysis was performed to determine whether sets of items designed to measure three different subskills of reading comprehension of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBSs) did, in fact, distinguish among these subskills. The three major skills objectives were: (1) facts; (2) generalizations; and (3) inferences. Data from…

Item bias is defined as the dependence of item responses and group membership conditional on the value of the trait that the test is supposed to measure. The results of item bias detection methods based on this conditional definition and using a stepwise or iterative procedure appear to be adequate. In this paper, experimental studies in the…

This is a part of the Manitoba Mathematics Assessment Program 1987. Actual testing material and the manual for grade six are provided. The test (90 items) requires two 45-minute sessions. The manual describes general testing instructions, administration, scoring method and key, and format for recording the final test scores. (YP)

A sixth-grade mathematics test was evaluated in two different ways, and the evaluations were compared. One method of evaluation was to use the Rasch model for item analysis and to accept or reject items on the basis of the extent to which the data fit the model. The other method of evaluation was to ask school superintendents and teachers to rate…

These item specifications were developed as a part of the Arkansas "Minimum Performance Testing Program" (MPT). There is one item specification for each instructional objective included in the MPT. The purpose of an item specification is to provide an overview of the general content and format of test items used to measure an…

The multifaceted structure of sentence-completion test items was analyzed to explain verbal comprehension. The three stimulus constituents were technical, logical-semantic, and associative-contextual. Guttman's facet and order theories and smallest space analysis were used. Results confirmed the multiple skills involved in solving these tasks.…

The contributions of open-ended tasks in examining students' mathematical performance were studied with 250 U.S. and 425 Chinese sixth graders. Open-ended tasks allow for analysis of student performance that cannot be assessed solely by percent correct or incorrect, but they pose many problems, such as those of translation. (SLD)

This booklet contains the practice tests for the Sixth-grade Ohio Proficiency Tests. Student work on these practice tests helps the teacher evaluate how well the student understands the subjects of writing, reading, mathematics, citizenship, and science. The writing test consists of two writing tasks based on one stimulus passage, and the reading,…