An English/reading steering committee was formed in the 1992-93 academic year at Miami-Dade Community College, in Florida, to recommend college-wide procedures and guidelines for including a writing sample on placement tests for entering students. The committee pilot tested a writing sample in two college-preparatory and one college-level English…

The predictive validity of the National Teacher Examinations (NTE) tests of communications skills (CS) and general knowledge (GK) as entrance requirements for teacher education programs and for later performance on the state certification examination were studied. Data were collected for 1,143 graduates of teacher education programs in North…

To determine whether the Posner task, which measures the speed at which information is retrieved from the long term memory, improves prediction of reading comprehension, 121 students from reading and study skills and teacher education courses were administered the Posner task and listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and SAT verbal…

A study was conducted to document the educational status, history, and standardized test performance of London, Ontario, students in the first-grade class of 1978-79 who did not reach the fourth grade by the fall of 1981. Additionally assessed was the predictive validity of Early Identification Ratings (EID) made in 1978-79. The following…

In July 1988, Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) initiated the Systematic Assessment of Leavers (SAL), a 2-year, 2-phase research activity to develop and implement a monitoring process to identify the personal, demographic, institutional, and environmental factors associated with leaving the college. The target populations of the study were…

Questions on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) with the largest score differences between women and men of all racial and ethnic groups were identified. Patterns of difficulty that would explain the SAT's continuing underprediction of female first-year college performance were studied. An item analysis of one form of the June 1986 SAT for 1,112…

The Management Assessment Center (MAC) of the Dade County (Florida) Public Schools is a unique project, employing multiple techniques to evaluate behavior for school-level administrator personnel selection. This final report of an evaluation deals primarily with issues of the validity and the utility of the MAC. To ascertain validity of the MAC,…

In January 1982, Wytheville Community College (WCC) adopted the English Qualifying Exam (EQE) as a mandatory placement test for all students wishing to enter English 101 or 111 (two first-quarter, college-level courses). Although the EQE proved suitable for placing students and predicting the number of quarters that would be required to complete…

Specific questions addressed in this study include how time limits affect a test's construct and predictive validities, how time limits affect an examinee's time allocation and test performance, and whether the assumption about how examinees answer items is valid. Interactions involving an examinee's sex and age are studied. Two parallel forms of…

During spring and fall 1985, a study was conducted at Cosumnes River College (CRC) to determine how assessment testing scores related to student persistence and performance. The student history files of a random sample of 498 students who had been tested by the CRC Assessment Center during spring and fall 1985 were examined, yielding the following…

The Johari Window--a model that categorizes degree of self-awareness and openness in communication into (1) information known to self and others (open), (2) information known to self but not to others (hidden), (3) information known to others but not self (blind), and (4) information known neither to self nor to others (unknown)--is a frequently…

The Child Abuse Potential Inventory was completed by 56 Head Start staff. Because the Head Start program creates an environment where staff work almost exclusively with parents or with children, it was possible to examine the perceived differences among workers attracted to child or parent work. Scores for classroom and non-classroom staff were…

The ability of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) and undergraduate grade point average (GPA) to predict success in medical school was studied, and two complementary methods of determining if the tests are biased against ethnic groups were examined. Data from 497 majority and 82 minority medical students at the College of Human Medicine at…

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) validity data on disabled students were obtained from 145 institutions with validity data on nonhandicapped students. First year grade point averages (FYAs) were obtained for almost 1,000 disabled students who had taken special test administrations of the SAT with extra time and for more than 650 disabled students…

This paper summarizes and analyzes data from studies of differential validity and differential prediction for blacks versus whites and females versus males. Forty studies on racial differences and 53 on gender differences were selected from searches of the ERIC, PsychInfo, and Dissertation Abstracts International databases; Buros' Mental…