Professional standards for educational testing recommend that both the overall standard error of measurement and the conditional standard error of measurement (CSEM) be computed on the score scale used to report scores to examinees. Several methods have been developed to compute scale score CSEMs. This paper compares three methods, based on…

We introduce the Newtonian Gravity Concept Inventory (NGCI), a 26-item multiple-choice instrument to assess introductory general education college astronomy ("Astro 101") student understanding of Newtonian gravity. This paper describes the development of the NGCI through four phases: Planning, Construction, Quantitative Analysis, and…

Introduction: The stability of the achievement goal orientation across different contexts has been a source of further research since the new millennium. Through theoretically-driven and empirically-based analyses, this study investigated the psychometric properties of the Elliot and McGregor 2x2 framework for achievement goal questionnaire within…

A multilevel analysis approach was used to analyse students' evaluation of teaching (SET). The low value of inter-rater reliability stresses that any solid conclusions on teaching cannot be made on the basis of single feedbacks. To assess a teacher's general teaching effectiveness, one needs to evaluate four randomly chosen course implementations.…

This is the first in a series of five articles describing a national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. In this paper, we describe the process by which we designed four new surveys to assess general education astronomy students' conceptual cosmology knowledge. These surveys focused…

This is the second of five papers detailing our national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. This article begins our quantitative investigation of the data. We describe how we scored students' responses to four conceptual cosmology surveys, and we present evidence for the inter-rater…

Any meaningful initiative to improve the teaching and learning in introductory control systems courses needs a clear test of student conceptual understanding to determine the effectiveness of proposed methods and activities. The authors propose a control systems concept inventory. Development of the inventory was collaborative and iterative. The…

Although concept inventories are among the most frequently used tools in the physics and astronomy education communities, they are rarely evaluated using item response theory (IRT). When IRT models fit the data, they offer sample-independent estimates of item and person parameters. IRT may also provide a way to measure students' learning gains…

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the dramatic consequences the application of cut-off points can have in the practice of identifying gifted individuals. The paradoxical attenuation effect describes the frequent situation in which measurements of the gifts and talents individuals possess are lower than their true values. However, in…

The purpose of multiple choice tests of medical knowledge is to estimate as accurately as possible a candidate's level of knowledge. However, concern is sometimes expressed that multiple choice tests may also discriminate in undesirable and irrelevant ways, such as between minority ethnic groups or by sex of candidates. There is little literature…

Curriculum-based measurement Reading (CBM-R) is an assessment procedure used to evaluate students' relative performance compared to peers and to evaluate their growth in reading. Within the response to intervention (RtI) model, CBM-R data are plotted in time series fashion as a means modeling individual students' response to varying levels of…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…

People can use a variety of different strategies to perform tasks and these strategies all have two characteristics in common. First, they can be evaluated in comparison with either an absolute or a relative standard. Second, they can be used at varying levels of consistency. In the present article, the authors develop a general theory of task…

Multiple-choice testing (MCT) has several advantages which are becoming more relevant in the current financial climate. In particular, they can be machine marked. As an objective testing method it is particularly relevant to engineering and other factual courses, but MCTs are not widely used in engineering because students can benefit from…