A comparison of achievement and personal adjustment of Spanish-speaking students in an experimental bilingual school environment at the first grade level was the purpose of the Harlandale instructional project. This evaluation report presents comparative data from the testing program used to establish the effectiveness of bilingual education when…

Information provided by typical and improved conventional classroom achievement tests was compared with information provided by an adaptive test covering the same subject matter. Both tests were administered to over 700 college students in a general biology course. Using the same scoring method, adaptive testing was found to yield substantially…

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been subjected to construct validation in a number of studies relating it to the development of moral judgment and to measures of cognitive development and political attitudes. The DIT has been found to have significant positive correlations with the Comprehension of Social-Moral Concepts Test for a variety of…

The New York State Education Department's state-wide testing program using the Pupil Evaluation Program (PEP) is shown to be generally inadequate for judging program or school effectiveness, or for making decisions which would allow improvements in program effectiveness. The Comprehensive Achievement Monitoring (CAM) system can, however, be…

The major challenge that school districts face is to improve the learning of all students, not just in individual schools, but across the entire system of schools. Duval County, Florida has embarked on a remarkable journey to implement standards-based reform in schools throughout the district with the intent to systematically improve teaching and…

Surveyed 1,148 Chinese junior, prevocational, secondary school students to investigate self-concepts and delinquent behaviors when compared to grammar secondary school counterparts. Examined data from an earlier study of junior grammar school students. Finds earlier group had higher self-esteem whereas the prevocational students were more likely…

Compares grades awarded by 5 examination boards for 11 subjects at A levels. Uses data from the A Level Information System (ALIS) project for 1989. Finds discrepancies among boards not statistically significant. Fails to identify grading as consistently severe or lenient. (NL)

The effects of test performance of differentially written multiple-choice tests and test takers' cognitive style were studied for 47 graduate students and 35 public school and college teachers. Adhering to test-writing item guidelines resulted in mean scores basically the same for two groups of differing cognitive style. (SLD)

The Nevada Proficiency Examination Program was established by legislative mandate in 1977. It consists of two major assessment efforts: administration of a nationally normed test to grades 3, 6, and 9; and the testing of all 11th graders in reading, writing, and mathematics. Students must pass all three examinations as a precondition for receiving…

Patterns of assistance in parent-child dyads were examined by developing measures that could be used to explore the nature of assistance and learner action sequences. A microgenetic approach was adopted in a teaching experiment that may be regarded as a variation of the double stimulation method of L. S. Vygotsky. A second goal was to explore the…

The relationship between student scores on standardized achievement tests taken in the eighth grade and the Ohio Ninth Grade Proficiency Test (ONGPT) was studied to determine whether standardized achievement test cut-off scores can be used in place of the ONGPT. Students enrolled in the eighth grade in an urban school district in the spring of…

College students' self-reported test anxiety levels in English, mathematics, physical science, and social science were compared to develop empirical support for the claim that students, in general, are more anxious about tests in rigorous academic subjects than in the humanities and to understand the curriculum-related sources of anxiety. It was…

The relationship between instructional treatment manifested as mastery learning and non-mastery learning strategies and various measures of Spanish proficiency was studied with 41 freshmen at an all-female high school in the New Orleans (Louisiana) area. Subjects were grouped homogeneously into 2 classes of 22 and 19 students, representing the…

The performance of 2,000 academically talented seventh-grade students on the American College Testing Program (ACT) Assessment was investigated in comparison with 2,000 college-bound 12th-grade examinees. Data from the February 1988 and February 1989 administrations of the ACT were used. Differential test performance and item performance were…

The impact of cohort changes with regard to ethnic group, gender, class rank, and first language learned on yearly average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) scores was studied. All examinee records, including student test scores and student responses to the Student Descriptive Questionnaire, in the College…