In preparation for adding an essay test to the General Educational Development (GED) test, the GED Testing Service undertook a series of studies to establish (1) whether acceptable reading reliabilities were attainable in decentralized holistic scoring sessions often involving no more than a dozen papers; (2) whether essay readers in a variety of…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between scores on the multiple-choice General Educational Development (GED) Writing Skills test and scores on holistically graded essays. Secondary purposes included the following: (1) examining the relationship of essay scores to scores on the multiple-choice GED Reading Skills…

Technical questions regarding the reliability and validity of large-scale portfolio assessment were studied which focused on: (1) whether raters can score collections of writing reliably with rubrics designed for single samples; (2) whether ratings derived from different frameworks differ in their capacities to support technically sound…

The New Standards Project (NSP) is an effort to create a state- and district-based assessment and professional development system to serve as a catalyst for major educational reform. As part of a professional development strategy tied to assessment, 114 teachers, curriculum supervisors, and assessment directors, representing 23 states and…