The primary purpose of this study was to provide preliminary validity evidence for a 140-item form of the Vocabulary Size Test, which is designed to measure written receptive knowledge of the first 14,000 words of English. Nineteen native speakers of English and 178 native speakers of Japanese participated in the study. Analyses based on the Rasch…

The validity of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (Third Edition) for identification and description of language disorders following brain injury was evaluated in 11 adolescents with traumatic brain injury. In general, the measure identified only those individuals who had previously been diagnosed as language impaired, not those…

This report describes the development, construction, and validation of the Preliminary Chinese Proficiency Test (Pre-CPT), a standardized, nationally-normed test of listening and reading comprehension for beginning-level native English-speaking learners of Chinese as a second language. The Pre-CPT was designed as a lower-level version of the…

Analyzes the differences in responses of 94 bilingual South African college students to questionnaires in both English and Afrikaans. Concludes that the use of translated questionnaires need not lead to biased results. (FMW)

This paper isolates and examines separately three distinct sources of error in essay scores: lack of agreement between raters; inconsistencies in performance within mode of discourse, and inconsistencies in performance between modes of discourse. Essay prompts in the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Writing Supplement were designed to assess…

The purpose of this study was to review and evaluate the Basic Inventory of Natural Language (BINL) to help determine whether it should continue to be used in Honolulu's Students of Limited English Proficiency (SLEP) Program. The study looked at four critical aspects of the BINL: its content validity, its test-retest reliability, its effectiveness…

This paper presents the development of the Arabic Picture Vocabulary Test (APVT), derived from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, for use in assessing the aural-vocabulary of newly arrived limited English proficiency children, from kindergarten through grade three, whose first language is Arabic. The APVT, an individually administered…

This paper reports on Educational Testing Service research studies investigating the parameters critical to reliability and validity in both the direct and indirect writing ability assessment of higher education applicants. The studies involved: (1) formulating an operational definition of writing competence; (2) designing and pretesting writing…