Recommendations from the Wirtz/Lapointe report, "Measuring The Quality of Education" (ED 213 769), which evaluates National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), are presented. Six educators respond to the concern that NAEP's reports and material are not widely known or as useful to educators as they should be. (CM)

Differences between national testing as discussed in the most recent report of the National Council on Education, Standards, and Testing, and by the Office of Technology Assessment are reviewed. National testing is not new, but the political use of nationally standardized achievement tests is a recent and dangerous trend. (SLD)

Implementing measurement specialists' ideas about content validity with licensure examinations and the problem of court litigation are discussed. Validity issues surfacing when sponsors of national licensure examinations conduct validity investigations are considered. Issues include local versus national focus on content validity, job analysis,…

The scales of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), as constructed, do not yield meaningful criterion-referenced interpretations. Poorly defined NAEP goals and the present knowledge base do not allow the measurement of what examinees can and cannot do. Inappropriate interpretations of NAEP data are discussed, with specific…

Item parameter estimates derived through item response theory methods have been considered relatively robust to changes in item position and context, but the anomaly in reading scores from the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) illustrates problems with common population equating procedures when there are test form changes.…

The relevance of state results on tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is illustrated with data from the "Digest of Education Statistics--1990" (U.S. Department of Education). Evidence indicates that the contributions of state differences such as economic or demographic differences to NAEP results cannot be…