This student workbook is intended for use in helping teenage and adult basic education (ABE) students reduce their anxiety over tests in general and over the General Educational Development (GED) test in particular. Exercises are provided to help students analyze and understand their feelings about and while taking tests, recall the childhood…

An approach to improve the test-taking abilities of minority students, and especially college students, are discussed. The problem of lower performance of minorities on norm-referenced, standardized test is also considered. One approach to help improve students' scores on standardized tests is test-taking instruction and practice on simulated…

Although research on testwiseness has varied to a great extent in the aspects of testwiseness measured and the strategies used, some conclusions can nevertheless be drawn: testwiseness is a bona fide entity and deserves attention, it is measurable, it appears to be made up of a set of specific skills rather than a collection of some general…

The research literature on short-term instruction (STI) and intermediate-term instruction (ITI) for the Scholastic Aptitude Test-mathematical section (SAT-M) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test-verbal sections (SAT-V) was reviewed. Selected studies of STI and ITI for tests other than the SAT-M and SAT-V, and of testwiseness (TW), were included in the…

Research indicates that when taking a standardized test that is not timed, students who have been coached to revise answers profit more from their changes than do those who receive no instruction at all. Some study skill books written for high school and college students give misleading advice not to change answers while some newer editions are…

Number right and elimination scores were analyzed on a 48-item college level mathematics test that was assembled from pretest data in three forms by varying the item orderings: easy-hard, uniform, or random. Half of the forms contained information explaining the item arrangement and suggesting strategies for taking the test. Several anxiety…

In a 1977 review of the literature on test answer changing, Mueller and Wasser (EJ 163 236) cited 17 studies and concluded that students changing answers on objective tests gain more points than they lost by so doing. Higher scoring students tend to gain more than do the lower scoring students. Six additional studies not reported in the Mueller…

Georgia Institute of Technology has created a preparatory workshop that avoids focusing composition courses on the state competency exam while helping its students pass the exam. In checking the exams of students who had failed, three problems appeared: lack of motivation, lack of awareness of the standards for grading the exam, and an inability…

This paper considers (1) the requirements imposed on data in order to conform to the Rasch model, (2) some common sources of departure from the model, and (3) a procedure for recognizing the occurrence of these disturbances. The specific disturbances discussed are guessing, practice, speededness, and bias. The observed characteristic curve for…

The effects of incentive conditions on the results of a confidence test were investigated. Two hundred thirty high school subjects were administered a very difficult confidence scored test under two conditions: 1) that the test would count heavily on their grades (incentive condition) and 2) that the test was for research purposes and would not be…

The study was an experimental investigation of the effects of item difficulty and subject ability on subjects answer-changing behaviors. Subjects were administered an achievement test composed of items at three levels of difficulty via slides, followed by a printed copy of the test. Analyses revealed no effects attributable to subject ability.…

This symposium paper describes 2 experiments in which the principles of observational learning were applied in school settings to the treatment of 2 separate groups of test-anxious junior high school students. The first experiment was designed to test the assumption that the counter-conditioning responses thought to occur in systematic…

The objectives of this study were to ascertain the existence of any widely held, systematic sets in response position selection (RPS) and to evaluate the potential biasing effects of such sets on multiple choice and true-false test results. It is concluded that a sudden change in the accustomed pattern of keyed response positions can shift…

Determines the relationship of sex, answer-changing incidence, and total score to net changes in total score resulting from changing answers, by examining the answer-changing behavior of graduate students responding to achievement test items. (Author/RC)

Describes an action approach to teaching reading to black children which matches a black learning style. (MKM)