Student evaluation of instruction in college and university courses has been a routine and mandatory part of undergraduate and graduate education for some time. A major shortcoming of the process is that it often relies exclusively on the opinions or qualitative judgments of students rather than the learning or transfer of knowledge that takes…

Successful teaching and learning of chemistry depends partly on correct use of a teaching method whose activities target most learning senses. Though chemistry enhances students' learning of biology, physics and agriculture on which Kenyan industries and prosperity depend, most secondary school students in Kenya perform poorly on the subject. This…

Currently, 848 Georgia public elementary schools that house third- and fifth-grades in the same building use the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accreditation as a school improvement model. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether elementary schools that are SACS accredited increased their levels of academic…

A simple way of comparing the more widely used measures of the outcomes of mental health treatment is offered through this list of measures that includes both practical information and information about psychometric considerations. Each review contains information about the format, practicality (administration time and scoring), reliability,…

The Swassing-Barbe Modality Index (SBMI) uses visual, auditory, and tactile inputs, but only reconstructed output, to measure children's modality strengths. In this experiment, the SBMI's three input modalities were crossed with two output modalities (spoken and drawn) in addition to the reconstructed standard to result in nine treatment…

A critical analysis is presented of the literature as it relates to survey research, including personal interviews, telephone interviews, and mail questionnaires. Additional research concerns are explored, and a code of ethics for survey researchers is presented. Focus groups, interviews, long interviews, telephone interviews, and mail surveys are…

The instructional validity of computer administered tests was studied with a focus on whether differences in test scores and item behavior are a function of instructional mode (computer versus non-computer). In the first of 3 studies, performance test scores for approximately 400 high school students in 1990-91 for tasks accomplished with the…

Since 1985, the students in grades 2-8 in three selected elementary schools in Palau have been tested on basic math skills. This report describes the data collected in May 1993 and indicates the relative strengths and weaknesses of students at each grade level in each school. Major outcomes include: (1) the students at Harris School scored…

The psychometric properties of objective tests administered in two testing conditions were compared, using an experimental take-home testing condition and a traditional in-class testing condition. Subjects were 290 college students in a basic educational psychology course who took a test developed and tested the previous semester. Two equivalent…

This paper addresses the cross-cultural development and use of the Behavior Description Index (BDI). The development of culturally-transportable scales; cross-cultural comparisons of results for 12 Spanish, 15 Hungarian, 15 Indonesian, and U.S. managers; and the transportability of competencies as constructs are considered. A competency is an…

An approach to detecting differential item functioning using the Rasch model with equivalent-group cross-validation was investigated. College students taking the Dental Admission Test, were divided by gender (936 females and 1,537 males) into 2 different samples. Rasch analyses were performed on both samples. Data were recalibrated after…

A detailed description is provided of the methodology that was used to develop the concordance tables reported in a recent study by G. L. Marco and A. A. Abdel-fattah (1991) on the relationships between scores on the enhanced American College Testing (ACT) Program Assessment and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Fourteen large universities…

Classical measurement theory was used to investigate the measurement (psychometric) characteristics of both parts of the Finding Embedded Figures Test (FEFT) administered in either a "no guessing" supply format or a multiple-choice selection format to undergraduate college students or to middle school students. Three issues were…

The measurement precision, efficiency, and validity of an adaptive test and four conventional listening tests designed to assess musical ability were compared. The conventional tests were the Seashore Tonal Memory Test and three tests (peaked, rectangular, and maximum discrimination) constructed from items in the 278-item adaptive test pool. The…

The instructional effectiveness of commercially prepared test preparation materials was studied using Riverside Publishing Company's "Improving Test-Taking Skills" materials. The study further investigated differential effects of test-taking instruction as a result of student characteristics. In the first year of the study (1986-87),…