In 1994 the State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards of the Council of Chief State School Officers began a study to examine the generalizability of performance-based assessments (PBAs) for state-mandated assessment programs. The intent was to examine the major sources of error associated with PBAs and the generalizability and…

The Transfer Procedure Test is taken by children around 11 years of age who wish to attend grammar schools in Northern Ireland. It is a high stakes test in that children are only allowed one attempt and their performance determines their future schooling in a manner that is not of their choice or of their parents. Candidates usually take two test…

The Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL) is an instrument that measures skills identified as critical in the New Standards for Speaking and Listening. In 5 to 10 minutes and without prior training, teachers can assess an individual child's current standing with respect to skills that research has identified as critical for literary…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess and evaluate the grant selection process for reading excellence program in Ohio. School districts in Ohio were given the opportunity to apply for funding to support district based reading programs through a request for proposal procedures. An effort was made to reliably and equitably score the…

A study was conducted to investigate the stability of rater severity over an extended rating period. Multifaceted Rasch analysis was applied to ratings of writing performances of 8,285 primary school (elementary) students. Each performance was rated on two performance dimensions by two trained raters over a period of 7 rating days. Performances…

This paper examines the purpose, validity, and reliability of performance indicators in higher education, focusing on the experience of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. Specifically, it studies the role of student entry and exit performance, teaching and staff quality, retention and completion, and placement in employment as…

This report provides empirical results of attempts to achieve consistency of estimates between two National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveys, the 1993-94 Private School Survey (PSS) and the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). Comparisons are made among statistical and computational procedures that may achieve the desired consistency…

The Minnesota Test of Critical Thinking (MTCT) has been designed to measure both critical thinking (CT) skills and a key disposition of critical reasoning: the willingness to evaluate arguments that are congruent with one's own goals and beliefs critically. The MTCT uses a taxonomy of CT skills derived from the American Philosophical Association's…

This study examined the psychometric and technical characteristics of various measures of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that are commonly used with preschool-aged children. Information on reliability, validity, norms, and scale-specific features was gathered from the test manuals of four commonly used behavior rating scales: (1)…

The purpose of this paper is to report a successful technique for assessing cooperative group work reliably and validly. The paper demonstrates a simple-to-use assessment procedure that tracks individual accountability, energizes student interaction, and rewards cooperative learning, even as it uses fewer administrative resources than traditional…

This paper aims to make the techniques of cooperative learning more attractive to teachers by presenting a method of assessment that avoids the drawbacks associated with trying to extract valid and reliable individual marks from cooperative performances. The paper presents an easy-to-use method of assessing an individual's contribution to a…

This paper focuses on teacher testing issues related to job analysis, test specification development, reliability, and validity. It emphasizes the conceptualization and operational definition of appropriate validity evidence to assess the quality of licensure testing decisions. It is suggested that the process of job, or practice, analysis would…

The purpose of the current study was to use multilevel modeling to quantify and explain the sources of score variation in standardized patient (SP) encounters. Through laypersons trained to portray SPs and record medical student actions, SP examinations allow the measurement of examinees' clinical and interpersonal skills. In this study, the SP…

Knowledge mapping is expected to measure deep conceptual understanding and allow students to characterize relationships among concepts in a domain visually. This research examined the validity of knowledge mapping as an assessment tool in science. The approach to investigating this validity was three-pronged. First, a model was outlined for the…

Recently, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) changed by including a writing section that gives the examinee an option between computer and handwritten formats to compose their responses. Unfortunately, this may introduce several potential sources of error that might reduce the reliability and validity of the scores. The seriousness…