With the advent of big data and advances in technology, psychological assessments have become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Nevertheless, traditional psychometric issues concerning the validity, reliability, and measurement bias of such assessments remain fundamental in determining whether score inferences of human attributes are…

Background and Aims: A literature review of both Eastern and Western literature regarding families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) revealed limited empirical research that examines ASD in China. Furthermore, most research in this area comes from a deficit model and there is a lack of research that comes from a strengths background.…

The goal of this paper is to examine the psychometric properties of a live-coded behavioral measure of joint attention, the "Attention-Following and Initiating Joint Attention Protocol" (JA Protocol), in order to assist researchers and clinicians in identifying when this measure may meet their joint attention assessment needs. Data from…

School climate measurement is a long-standing topic in educational research. This review article provides an overview and appraisal of school climate measures published between 2003 and 2013 in scientific journals. A search for published school climate instruments for secondary school students was made in three databases. Twelve articles meeting…

This is the first book to gather and address what we have learned about the impacts and challenges of data-intensive teacher evaluation systems--a defining characteristic of the current education policy landscape. Expert researchers and practitioners speak to what we know (and what remains to be known) about evaluation measures themselves, the…

The reliability of a new scale to assess Autistic Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), and Asperger's Disorder in children was examined. Parents or other caregivers rated symptoms of 207 children between 2 and 16 years of age. The scale, which had 40 items in the final version, correlated highly with…

Research has consistently shown that principal leadership matters for successful schools. Evaluating principals on the behaviors shown to improve student learning should be an important leverage point for raising leadership quality. Yet principals are often evaluated with the use of instruments with no theoretical background and little, if any,…

This study described the process of developing and validating the College Chemistry Self-Efficacy Scale (CCSS) that can be used to assess college students' beliefs in their ability to perform essential tasks in chemistry. In the first phase, data collected from 363 college students provided evidence for the validity and reliability of the new…

Quality measures were originally developed for research aimed at describing the settings that children spend time in and identifying the characteristics of these environments that contribute to children's development. They were also developed to guide improvements in practice. Increasingly, however, measures of quality are being used for further…

Early identification of social-emotional behavioral problems in infants and preschoolers is critical. Nine parent-report and caregiver/teacher-report instruments measuring preschool social-emotional behavioral problems and strengths are reviewed. Advantages to the use of parent-report and caregiver/teacher-report instruments are that they are easy…

An examination of the extent to which scores on the Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI) for Children and Adults, Third Edition, accurately reflect 10 judges' observations of stuttering behaviors found that SSI scores obscured the wide range of judges' raw counts and did not accurately reflect the observational data from which they were derived.…

This paper describes the Measure of Epistemological Reflection (MER), an instrument to assess cognitive developmental level according to the Perry scheme of intellectual and ethical development. It contains sets of questions for each of the six cognitive domains: decision making, learner role, instructor role in the learning process, peer role in…

One of the best methods of formative assessment in academic areas and a method that exemplifies the characteristics of good measures is Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM; Deno, 1985). Developed at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970's, CBM has been researched in academic areas including mathematics computation, concepts, and…

Cason and Cason's model of performance rating was used to determine the extent to which variation in reviewer standards affected the reliability and validity of the program review process used to select papers for inclusion in the annual program. Data analyzed were the overall recommendation for acceptance and ratings on seven quality criteria…

This study, involving 24 children or adolescents with pervasive developmental disorders, assessed 3 autism scales: Autism Behavior Checklist, Real Life Rating Scale, and Childhood Autism Rating Scale. The study analyzed interrater reliability, correlations between pairs of the three scales, diagnostic classification cutoff scores, and…