This report summarizes some of the evidence supporting interpretations of scores from the enhanced ACT, focusing on reliability, concurrent validity, predictive validity, and score comparability. The authors argue that the evidence presented in this report supports the interpretation of scores from the enhanced ACT as measures of high school…

There is a tradeoff between scale length and psychometric concerns. The two are, in fact, directly linked. Generally, when scales are shortened, reliability is reduced, and when scales are lengthened, reliability is improved, provided the items added to the scale are comparable psychometrically (AERA et al., 2014). Scale reliability, in turn,…

This meta-analytic path analysis presents evidence that first-year academic performance (FYAP), measured by first-year grade point average (FYGPA) plays the major role in determining second-year student retention and that socioeconomic status (SES), measured by parental income, plays a negligible role. Based on large sample data used in a previous…

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that English Learners (ELs) are included in annual state testing (grades 3-8 and once in high school) and included in each state's accountability system disaggregated by subgroup to ensure that they receive the support they need to learn English, participate fully in their education experience, and graduate…

Undergraduate grade point average (GPA) is a commonly employed measure in educational research, serving as a criterion or as a predictor depending on the research question. Over the decades, researchers have used a variety of reliability coefficients to estimate the reliability of undergraduate GPA, which suggests that there has been no consensus…

The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension Test, fourth edition (GMRT-4) and the ACT Reading Tests (ACT-R) were administered to 423 high school students in order to explore the similarities and dissimilarities of data produced through classical test theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) analysis. Despite the many advantages of IRT…

The problem of fitting unidimensional item-response models to potentially multidimensional data has been extensively studied. The focus of this article is on response data that contains a major dimension of interest but that may also contain minor nuisance dimensions. Because fitting a unidimensional model to multidimensional data results in…

Composite scores are often formed from test scores on educational achievement test batteries to provide a single index of achievement over two or more content areas or two or more item types on that test. Composite scores are subject to measurement error, and as with scores on individual tests, the amount of error variability typically depends on…

Using detailed individual-level data from public universities in the state of Ohio, I estimate the effect of various institutional expenditures on the probability of graduating from college. Using a competing risks regression framework, I find differential impacts of expenditure categories across student characteristics. I estimate that student…

The primary objective of this study was to find the smallest sample size for which equating based on a random groups design could be expected to result in less overall equating error than had no equating been conducted. Mean, linear, and equipercentile equating methods were considered. Some of the analyses presented in this paper assumed that the…

This paper discussed methods currently under study for use with multiple-response data. Besides using Bonferroni inequality methods to control type one error rate over a set of inferences involving multiple response data, a recently proposed methodology of plotting the p-values resulting from multiple significance tests was explored. Proficiency…

An argument based on the content fit among a college course, the American College Testing Program (ACT) Assessment tests, and students' high school course work is described to justify use of ACT scores and self-reported high school grades for placement of college freshmen in undergraduate remedial education. A utility-based approach to quantifying…