Proposes a system of achievement testing for all U.S. students rather than just those who are college bound. Criticizes present achievement testing as a patchwork system that fails to provide parents with information about how much their children are learning in comparison to others. Provides a sampling of national achievement test questions from…

A professor submitted a passage on Native American literature for the reading comprehension section of a postgraduate standardized test. The passage (reproduced in full) points out the difficult questions that Native American literature poses about personal identity. The passage was rejected as potentially disturbing to Native American test…

A study involving 570 individuals with mental retardation developed the Screening Tool of Feeding Problems, an assessment designed to identify feeding problems presented by persons with mental retardation, and thus facilitate the process of identifying who would benefit from some type of behavioral or medical intervention. Psychometric data are…

This article offers some solutions used in the assembly of the computerized Uniform Certified Public Accountancy (CPA) licensing examination as practical alternatives for operational programs producing large numbers of forms. The Uniform CPA examination was offered as an adaptive multistage test (MST) beginning in April of 2004. Examples of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the response patterns of African American students to the state certification questions. More specifically, the participants' explanations of their responses and their perceptions of the source of knowledge they used to answer the questions were discussed. To achieve this purpose, three research questions…

There are usually many testing activities going on in a school, with different tests serving different purposes, thus organization and planning are key in creating an efficient system in assessing the most important educational objectives. In the ideal case, an assessment system will be able to inform on student learning, instruction and…

Test-item writing efforts typically results in item pools with an undesirable correlational structure between the content attributes of the items and their statistical information. If such pools are used in computerized adaptive testing (CAT), the algorithm may be forced to select items with less than optimal information, that violate the content…

Annually in the People's Republic of China (China) several million secondary school graduates who wish to gain entrance to Chinese universities and colleges take the National Matriculation English Test (NMET)--the university entrance test of English for the entire country. This article first describes the test, and then focuses on examining its…

This booklet presents the Reading Framework for the 1992 and 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which contains the rationale for the aspects of reading assessed and the criteria for the development of the assessment. The booklet notes that the new reading assessment examines students' abilities to construct, extend, and…

Test items are designed to be representative of the subject areas that they measure and to reflect the importance of specific domains or item types within those subject areas. Content validity is achieved by content specification and number of items in each content domain included in the design of the test. However, largely due to the normal…

This paper presents a multistage adaptive testing test development paradigm that promises to handle content balancing and other test development needs, psychometric reliability concerns, and item exposure. The bundled multistage adaptive testing (BMAT) framework is a modification of the computer-adaptive sequential testing framework introduced by…

This document is a supplement to the Test Content Description for the Georgia High School Test in Mathematics. The sample items are representative of items on the actual Georgia High School Tests. The strands (major areas) being tested are: (1) Number and Composition (17% to 19% of the test); (2) Data Analysis (19-21% of the test); (3) Measurement…

This document is a supplement to the Test Content Description for the Georgia High School Test in Science. The sample items are representative of items on the actual Georgia High School Tests. The strands (major areas) being tested are: (1) Process/Research Skills (30% to 32% of the test); (2) Physical Science (33% to 35% of the test); and…

This paper traces some ideas produced by adolescent students when deciding among different explanations of a past situation. For this purpose, a sample of 270 Portuguese students ranging from 12 to 20 years old, attending 7th to 11th grades, was analyzed in a qualitative approach. Students' ideas were mapped through five levels of progression, in…

This demonstration booklet describes the 2005 assessments. The first three sections explain the purposes and content of the NAEP reading, mathematics, and science assessments and provide sample test questions at each grade level. The fourth section includes the directions and the background questions that all students will be asked to answer. The…