Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

The importance of student assessment, particularly for summative purposes, has increased greatly over the past thirty years. At the same time, emphasis on including all students in assessment programs has also increased. Assessment programs, whether they are large-scale, district-based, or teacher developed, have traditionally attempted to assess…

The Guidelines for Good Practice of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) stress the importance of collaboration between all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities and programmes for testing and assessment. Collaboration is considered to be as important as validity and reliability,…

"Educational Measurement" has been the bible in its field since the first edition was published by ACE in 1951. The importance of this fourth edition of "Educational Measurement" is to extensively update and extend the topics treated in the previous three editions. As such, the fourth edition documents progress in the field and…

This collection explores the theory and applications of educational testing. It is divided into sections on theory and general principles of educational measurement, administration of tests and scoring, and applications of testing. The following chapters present information on test theory and use: (1) "Current Perspectives and Future…

This book addresses some of the important considerations surrounding the use of tests and assessment procedures when applied to students who are culturally, linguistically, and/or socioeconomically different from mainstream North Americans. Chapter 1 introduces the problems of using standards based on a white Anglo-Saxon perspective to assess and…

Of the 15 substantive papers in this report, 12 focus on the use of the Kent Infant Development (KID) Scale with severely handicapped children. The KID Scale measures 252 behaviors usually developed during the first year of life in five domains (cognitive, motor, language, self-help, and social). It was successfully adapted to elicit reliable…

A basic technical framework is provided for the design and use of mastery tests. The Mastery Testing Project (MTP) prepared this framework using advanced mathematics supplemented with computer simulation based on real test data collected by the South Carolina Statewide Testing Program. The MTP focused on basic technical issues encountered in using…

These studies in test adequacy focus on two problems: procedures for estimating reliability, and techniques for identifying ineffective distractors. Fourteen papers are presented on recent advances in measuring achievement (a response to Molenaar); "an extension of the Dirichlet-multinomial model that allows true score and guessing to be…

This collection contains four papers that were presented as part of a short course delivered at the 1991 annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association. The papers discuss various aspects of the development and use of "The Competent Speaker," a public speaking assessment instrument designed for the college sophomore level. The papers and…

Increased demands for colleges and universities to engage in outcomes assessment for accountability purposes have accelerated the need to bridge the gap between higher education practice and the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation. The "Handbook on Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Higher Education" provides higher…

Three papers address issues in course evaluation and assessment of student performance in language awareness programs. The first paper concentrates on the formative evaluation of a course, during its design phase or in progress. It focuses on self-evaluation and two features of course design considered essential to course integrity: explicitness…