The development and validation of the Home Learning Environment Profile (HLEP) are outlined. The HLEP instrument was designed to assess successful preschool home educational programs for Hawaiian families. The instrument covers sociodemographic, cultural, and environmental factors of Hawaiian families. After an extensive review of published…

Computer adaptive testing systems are feasible for certification and licensure testing. This is in part due to the availability of extensive yet inexpensive computers. Modern item response theory, combined with computerized adaptive testing, yields a powerful new method of testing which provides greater accuracy and efficiency and less boredom for…

Intended for teachers, this collection of articles on testing in the English language arts contains the following titles: "What Do Test Scores 'Really' Mean in Educational Policy?" by George F. Madaus; "Testing and Literacy: A Contradiction in Terms?" by Marilyn Wilson; "Throwing in the TOWL," by Mary Jane Curry; "Taking the Authority Figure Out…

The Professional and Administrative Career Examination measures judgment ability using comprehension and logical order of events item types. Since the verbal component of comprehension items is high, and since these items are extremely difficult to write and document, a search was conducted for a simpler item type for assessing judgment. Three…

Teaching staff represent a powerful influence on program development. Therefore it is essential that their opinions be ascertained and analyzed in a school evaluation. The Teacher Opinion Inventory was developed to accomplish three goals: (1) to assess teacher opinion toward many facets of the school; (2) to provide teacher recommendations for…

The Assessment of Readiness for the Professional Practice of Ministry project, sponsored by the Association of Theological Schools, studied methods for determining a person's readiness to enter the mimtry and perform effectively. Simultaneously, the Lutheran Seminarian Project assessed the needs and strengths of beginning seminary students. Both…

A reading ability test is described in terms of its purpose, its outline, its reliability, and judgments about the relevance of its content. Copies of the two forms of the test and the answer key are appended. A review of some of the literature on literacy indicates the difficulty of reaching consensus in its definition or in the setting of…

A project was conducted to determine whether a vocational student's version of the Affective Work Competencies Inventory could be prepared to measure the psychological constructs of values, habits, and attitudes. A revised inventory was developed and administered to 194 students in eight selected programs at Toledo vocational high schools (data…

The feasibility of criterion referenced testing is held to be dependent on the tenability of two postulates: (1) that bias can be controlled in a principled manner from one test to the next; and (2) that one mental process measured by such tests may lawfully interact with another. Without the first postulate, criterion scores could not be…

An experiment was performed with computer-generated data to investigate some of the operational characteristics of tailored testing as they are related to various provisions of the computer program and item pool. With respect to the computer program, two characteristics were varied: the size of the step of increase or decrease in item difficulty…

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a Jungian-oriented self-report inventory which classifies people into dichotomous categories along four scales: extraversion-introversion, sensation-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judgment-perception. Introduced in 1942, the scoring and items have changed after several items analyses. Form F contains 51 phrase…

A pilot study on the development and administration of a test using a spatial reasoning problem, the 15-puzzle, is described. The test utilizes on-line capabilities of a real-time computer to record an examinee's progress on each problem through a sequence of problem-solving "moves", and to collect additional on-line data that might be…

The Cognitive Curriculum uses a nontraditional approach to language instruction. Children play an active role, learning from concrete experiences while writing and reading their own material. This type of instruction has been developed with Project Follow Through students and has been particularly successful in writing instruction. The Productive…

Four new versions of an acoustic structuring test were developed, administered, and analyzed in order to produce better tests and to contribute to better understanding of the abilities measured by these tests. The tests consist of tape recordings of patterns of musical notes played on an electric organ or an acoustic guitar. Item analyses and…

The Behavior Rating Checklist (BRC) was developed in the Austin Independent School District to evaluate the counseling component in the Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I compensatory education programs for students in kindergarten through grade 5. The BRC was developed by: defining the behavior on which the counseling activities focused;…