Guidelines for test item-writing have traditionally recommended making the correct answer of a multiple-choice item grammatically consistent with its stem. To investigate the effects of adhering to this practice, certain item formats were designed to determine whether the practice of providing relevant grammatical clues, in itself, created cue…

Problems of obtaining a representative sample for a national survey are discussed, and the experiences of Educational Testing Service are used as examples of some methods used to cope with these problems. It is suggested that researchers: (1) capitalize on some existing program; (2) establish in the minds of the possible examinees and the possible…

Students' reactions to preliminary Ph.D. examinations are investigated in this study examining responses to stress and techniques of adaptation. The applications of stress in a social science context are discussed and elements of successful social adaptation are examined. A study of 20 graduate students taking departmental written examinations…

Ninety children were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) with the standardized administration, as well as an elicited word response task of the PPVT Stimulus Plates. The subjects were inner city black (BIC), inner city white (WIC), and middle class white (WMC) children. The data were analyzed to determine consistency of item…

The results obtained by three test administration modes were examined with a focus upon systematic bias due to lack of standardization of test administration procedures. The My Class Inventory was administered to ninety classrooms of fifth grade students in a large suburban school district. The 45 items on the inventory are distributed over five…

Sedlacek and Brooks in measuring the attitudes of whites toward blacks with the Situational Attitude Scale (SAS) have used trained white administrators in all previous studies. The purpose of white administrators was to avoid calling attention to the racial variable being measured. However the instrument is not the entire simulus presented to…

Contrary to popular opinion, it is very difficult to find any objective evidence of culture bias that could account for social class and racial differences in performance on current standard tests of intelligence, even those like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), which give the appearance of being highly culture-loaded. They may be…

The advantages that computer adaptive testing offers over linear tests have been well documented. The Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) design is more efficient than the Linear test design as fewer items are needed to estimate an examinee's proficiency to a desired level of precision. In the ideal situation, a CAT will result in examinees answering…

The relationship between 15 emotional indicators on the Bender Gestalt Test and the acting out behavior of 93 children, ages 5 to 12, as rated by their teachers, was investigated. Use of the Bender as a projective measure was seriously questioned. The ten-item behavioral rating scale is appended. (MH)

The media has recently exposed that grade inflation is a concern for higher education in North America. Grade inflation may be due to consumerism by universities that now compete for students. Keeping students happy (and paying) may have been emphasized more than learning. We review the literature on faculty evaluation and present a model that…

Sixty fourth, fifth, and sixth grade African American students (37 males and 23 females) at a public school in northeast Mississippi were administered the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking--Figural Form A (TTCT). Subjects were from 9 to 13 years old. The TTCT consists of 3 subtests: (1) picture construction (1 stimulus); (2) picture completion…

The rule space model permits measurement of cognitive skill acquisition, diagnosis of cognitive errors, and detection of the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge possessed by individuals. Two ways to classify an individual into his or her most plausible latent state of knowledge include: (1) hypothesis testing--Bayes' decision rules for minimum…

A study investigated the reason for the high performance of bilingual children on a syllogistic reasoning task. Thirty-nine Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 3 through 6 were asked to solve problems in both languages. Response times were recorded, and the subjects were asked to justify their answers to assess to what extent…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

A method of adjusting for bias due to nonresponse to an alumni survey is demonstrated, based upon analysis of data from both on-time and late respondents. The responses are opinions of 254 alumni regarding how they rate their recently completed program of study within a college of an urban university. As part of the university's curriculum review…