Higher education's ability to retain students through to graduation appears to be an international challenge. This is also the case in South Africa where only 27% of student complete their studies in minimum time and where 55% are unlikely to ever graduate. These challenges have meant that extended degree programmes, where degrees are formally…

Purpose: The authors set out to determine (a) whether African American children's spontaneous spoken language met use criteria for a revised minimal competence core with original and added morphosyntactic patterns at different geographical locations, and (b) whether pass/fail status on this core was differentiated on other criterion measures of…

Georgia law mandates that students who fail the state Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) twice in grades three, five, and eight be retained, unless a committee is convened including a subject-area teacher, an administrator, and the student's parent or guardian. If the committee unanimously decides the student may be successful in the…

This monograph has grown out of a series of discussions and a six-month period of reading and reflecting on the literature which were initiated by Fritz Mosher's suggestions to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to examine the "standards" question. Conversations with Mosher himself and the staff of NAEP have been most…

Judge-mediated examinations are defined as those for which expert evaluation (using rubrics) is required to determine correctness, completeness, and reasonability of test-taker responses. The use of multifaceted Rasch modeling has led to improvements in the reliability of scoring such examinations. The establishment of criterion-referenced…