The "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education are intended to provide a comprehensive basis for evaluating tests. This digest identifies key standards applicable to most test…

This Digest overviews legal challenges in five areas of test use for decision-making in schools: ability tracking, placement in special education classes, test scores as college admissions criteria, test disclosure, and teacher competency testing. Cases illustrating these challenges are described and include: Hobson v. Hansen (1967), Moses v.…

This digest focuses on academic testing and American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. Ideally, test results should be used to improve student learning. Proponents of high-stakes testing say it is needed to measure student achievement and school quality and to hold students and teachers accountable. High-stakes testing is also used to…

The testing of many American Indian children using standardized exams (achievement, aptitude, ability, and intelligence tests) developed for the majority American society represents a case of cross-cultural testing which is likely to produce invalid results in the form of underestimation of student performance. Requirements for obtaining accurate…

Multicultural perspectives on assessment challenge traditional perspectives by advancing an additional source of variation in test responses that is presumed to escape test developers and test users. Increasing and convergent evidence from multiple sources indicates the following types of ethnocentric errors in test development, administration,…