Twenty-two subjects were asked to generate fifty numbers from 0 to 100 at ten second intervals. These subjects were then taught to imagine a pleasant scene or an aversive scene on cue from the experimenter. After practice imagining these scenes, subjects were again requested to give fifty numbers between 0 and 100. Group I was cued to imagine the…

Seven undergraduate volunteers studied a written passage on Atomic Structure and then, while answering a set of 24 multiple-choice items, talked aloud about the strategies they were using for option selection. The tape recordings of their verbal responses were analyzed for latency, memory references, and inference references. The items testing…

A conventional test and two forms of a stradaptive test were administered to thousands of simulated subjects by minicomputer. Characteristics of the three tests using several scoring techniques were investigated while varying the discriminating power of the items, the lengths of the tests, and the availability of prior information about the…

The purpose of this practicum was to change the grading policy in the San Juan Unified School District (California) through a two-state process. The first stage was to change the traditional ABCDF grading system to a three-scale grading system in one high school, one intermediate school, and six elementary schools serving the same attendance area.…

An attempt is made to explore the use of subjective probabilities in the analysis of item data, especially criterion-referenced item data. Two assumptions are implicit: (1) one wants to obtain a maximum amount of information with respect to an item using a minimum number of subjects; and (2) once the item is validated, it may well be administered…

This absolute scale contains nine times, each of which consists of a 100 millimeter vertical line with small division marks every 25 millimeters with the words "high" at the top and "low" at the bottom of the line. Above each of the vertical lines is a word or phrase. For the second grade scale these words are: arithmetic, counting, adding,…

This second grade scale contains ten items related to arithmetic and one item related to each of the following topics: reading, art, and playing. The third grade scale, which is not included, follows a similar format although the items do differ somewhat in content. Each question is followed by five boxes of succeedingly smaller size. The child…

This paper outlines one approach for adapting the widely used word association technique for use as an evaluation measure. In this approach, project participants are presented with a number of stimulus words reflecting project objectives and are asked to give free associations to these terms. Responses are scored either by the nature of semantic…

This study's aim was to explore the relationship of acquiescence, social desirability (SD), and defensiveness response styles with first, second, and any higher order factors on the 16 PF. All the various kinds of response bias indexes were appreciably correlated with the first order factor scales. Each kind of response style measure predominantly…

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of social reinforcement as a function of familiarity with the adult agent administering the reinforcers. First and fifth grade children were tested in a marble dropping task on two successive days. On the second day half of the children at each grade level were tested by the same experimenter…

One common laboratory manipulation in interpersonal attraction has been the exchange of reinforcements in the form of similar or dissimilar attitude statements. The first impression should influence not only attraction responses and subsequent behavior, but also should influence the perception of subsequent information received in the course of an…

This paper provides substantial evidence in favor of the continued use of conventional objective testing procedures in lieu of either the Coombs' cross-out technique or the Dressel and Schmid free-choice response procedure. From the studies presented in this paper, the tendency is for the cross-out and the free choice methods to yield a decrement…

Two basic issues are discussed that involve the Carver model of the relationship between test score and knowledge. The first of these concerns different types of tests which have different probabilities of obtaining the correct answer due to guessing. A derivation is shown which places different test types "on-a-par"--meaning that two tests are…

The Matching Family Figures Test (MFF) is examined in order to show that a wide variety of rational speed-accuracy trade-offs ranging from impulsive to reflective are quite plausible. Ten children (mean age, eight years) took part in the experiment. Five had previously been classified on the basis of the MFF as impulsive, five as reflective. On…

Different forms of a vocabulary test were administered to college students. Results indicated that as the frequency of specific determiners increased, they formed increasingly strong but differential guessing response sets in high and low scoring groups; however, the magnitude of the effect was much stronger for position specific determiners.…