Although collaboration is recognized as an effective means to address multifaceted community issues, successful collaboration is difficult to achieve and failure is prevalent. To effectively collaborate, collaborators must recognize the strengths and weaknesses within their own efforts. Using Mattessich and colleagues' work as a springboard, a…

Student assessment is central to the educational process and can be used for multiple purposes including, to promote student learning, to grade student performance and to evaluate the educational quality of qualifications. It is, therefore, of utmost importance that assessment instruments are of a high quality. In this article, we present various…

Determining evidence-based practices is a complicated enterprise that requires analyzing the methodological quality and magnitude of the available research supporting specific practices. This article reviews criteria and procedures for identifying what works in the fields of clinical psychology, school psychology, and general education; and it…

Good quality data is paramount for applied economic research. If the data are distorted, corresponding conclusions may be incorrect. We demonstrate how Benford's law, the distribution that first digits of numbers in certain data sets should follow, can be used to test for data abnormalities. We conduct an analysis of nine commonly used data sets…

The Community College Student Report (CCSR) is a widely-used survey instrument. This article examines the reliability and validity of the instrument to assess its usefulness in institutional research and practice. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that factor analytic models adequately represent underlying constructs. Confirmatory factor…

Although provider knowledge is a potential barrier in the dissemination of evidence-based services for youth, research in this area is currently limited by a lack of instrumentation. The present study examined the utility of the Knowledge of Evidence-Based Services Questionnaire (KEBSQ), a 40-item self-report measure designed to assess reporter…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have contributed to test development and validation in counseling psychology, but additional applications have not been fully realized. The author presents an overview of the goals, terminology, and procedures of factor analysis; reviews best practices for extracting,…

Group projects form a large and possibly growing component of the work undertaken for assessing students for postgraduate degrees in business. Yet the assessments sources, methods and purposes result in an array of combinations that the literature on assessment fails to capture in its full complexity. This paper builds on a new framework for…

The purpose of this article is to review substantive and methodological advances in interventive research. Three substantive advances are discussed: (a) the growing use of a risk factor perspective, (b) the emergence of practice-relevant micro social theories, and (c) the increased acceptance of structured treatment protocols and manual. In…

The purpose of this book is to make it possible for measurement specialists to solve practical testing problems through the use of item response theory (IRT). The topics, organization, and presentation are those used in a 4-week seminar held each summer for the past several years. The material is organized to facilitate understanding; all related…

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge. The material is organized into five units: (1) introduction to measurement theory; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) item analysis in test development; and (5) test scoring and…

This invited special issue of "Early Education and Development" presents research related to the Early Development Instrument (EDI; Janus & Offord, 2007), a community tool to assess children's school readiness at a population level. In this editorial introduction, we first sketch out recent trends in school readiness research that call for a…

This paper describes a comprehensive model of alignment that provides a foundation for meaningful reporting of students' academic progress over time. The model includes both horizontal and vertical alignment as integral parts of the development of content standards, test blueprints, items, item pools, instruments, performance level descriptors,…

Value-added modeling (VAM) to estimate school and teacher effects is currently of considerable interest to researchers and policymakers. Recent reports suggest that VAM demonstrates the importance of teachers as a source of variance in student outcomes. Policymakers see VAM as a possible component of education reform through improved teacher…

Research on student assessment in online environments has not been extensive, although manuals for instructors provide broad guidelines and specific procedures. In this article we review the most frequently reported approaches to online assessment in postsecondary settings, giving particular attention to systems for assessing the quality of…