This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

This publication reviews issues and processes in the quest for less-biased, least-biased, non-biased assessment. It is intended to aid the school psychologist in assisting all individuals in placement or program decisions for school-age children. The first section articulates the common sources of bias in assessment and identifies concepts…

When selecting standardized reading tests for purposes of decision making, the school psychologist must answer several questions, such as "What reading skills do I wish to assess?" or "How do I judge if the test is technically adequate?" Recommendations for test selection are made within the context of these questions.…

A commentary is made on a previously published article concerning testing the equivalence of covariance matrices. An error in the previous article (by the same authors) is pointed out and the consequences of the error are discussed. (JKS)

Guidelines for setting performance standards for minimum competency testing are suggested. Because qualitative judgments are involved, certain options should be considered, such as periodic reviews and necessary revisions of standards; use of experience-based rather than arbitrary standards; and thorough consideration of standards, even if the…

Twelve common errors which can invalidate an otherwise sound evaluation are identified, and ways to avoid them are presented. The hazards are: (1) grade-equivalent scores; (2) inappropriate statistical adjustments with nonequivalent control groups; (3) administering norm-referenced tests at inappropriate times of the school year; (4) inappropriate…

The authors center their presentation of material around a conceptual understanding of psychometric issues, such as validity and reliability, and on purpose rather than procedure, the "why" rather than the "how to." Their goal is to introduce psychometric principles at a level that is deeper and more focused than found in introductory…

According to the stage-learning hypothesis, children's ability to learn is constrained by their pretraining stages of cognitive development. Some procedures for obtaining unconfounded tests of this hypothesis are developed in this paper, and some applications to factorial experiments are considered. (Author/BW)

The ultimate goal of the institutional researcher is not always to test a research hypothesis, but more often simply to find an appropriate model to gain an understanding of the underlying characteristics and interrelationships of the data. Exploratory data analysis provides a means of accomplishing this. (Author)

A discussion of multifacet Rasch model analysis describes the Rasch model and its assumptions, then presents an extension of the model to include a facet for the influence of examiner severity. The model is illustrated with an application to an oral examination administered by a medical specialty board. (Author/MSE)

A model for summarizing test scores and using them to modify instructional programs is presented. The proposed model consists of two types of summaries of the data gathered through standardized tests. The first summary contains individual and single class results. Information in a "Class Item Response Record" chart provides individual student…

Provides an introduction to structural equation modelling (SEM) for language research, including: general objectives of SEM applications relevant to language assessment; methodology and statistical assumptions about data that must be met; commonly-used SEM steps and concepts; application matters, with sample models; and recent critical discussions…

Developed by the Assessment/Advisement Center (AAC) at Missouri's Crowder College (CC), this handbook is designed as a model for other community college testing and advisement centers in establishing assessment policies and practices. First, an introduction is provided, describing changes in the role of assessment since the advent of on-line…

This article presents a model that can be used by local school districts for reanalyzing standardized test results to obtain a more valid assessment of local learning objectives can be used to identify strengths/weaknesses of existing programs as well as individual students. (EGS)

Discusses writing assessment's recent evolution toward "tests worth teaching to." Urges further departure from accountability evaluation models toward an ecological model (Part two of this article appears in v10 n2 p4-10 Apr 1988; see EJ 371 768). (MM)