An Angoff standard setting study generally yields judgments on a number of items by a number of judges (who may or may not be nested in panels). Variability associated with judges (and possibly panels) contributes error to the resulting cut score. The variability associated with items plays a more complicated role. To the extent that the mean item…

The paper examines "Campbell's Law": "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." The examination of measurability leads to explaining the…

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy-making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in-house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned…

As educational practitioners and policymakers expand the range of student outcomes they assess, student perception surveys--particularly those targeting social-emotional learning--have grown in popularity. Despite excitement around the potential for measuring a wider array of important student outcomes, concerns about the validity of the…

This article contrasts 2 approaches to analyzing transitivity of preference and other behavioral properties in choice data. The approach of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011) assumes that on each choice, a decision maker samples randomly from a mixture of preference orders to determine whether "A" is preferred to "B." In contrast, Birnbaum…

A teacher's value-added score is intended to convey how much that teacher has contributed to student learning in a particular subject in a particular year. Different school districts define and compute value-added scores in different ways. A variety of people may see value-added estimates, and each group may use them for different purposes.…

The current study examines the consistency of two response-to-intervention (RTI) decision-making models. Weekly progress monitoring data for 30 students participating in a Tier II intervention were collected for 30 weeks. The data were examined by comparing them to an aimline with a yearly goal and by computing a dual discrepancy (DD) using…

The 2009 college football season is here, but there has been a continuing controversy swirling over how the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) selects its national champion. College football uses a multi-criterion decision matrix (MCDM) evaluation technique to determine which two teams will play for the national championship. We analyzed the BCS…

Data Envelopment Analysis has become a popular tool for evaluating the efficiency of decision making units. The nonparametric approach has been widely applied to educational production. The approach is, however, deterministic and leads to biased estimates of performance in the presence of measurement error. Numerous simulation studies confirm the…

Short tests containing at most 15 items are used in clinical and health psychology, medicine, and psychiatry for making decisions about patients. Because short tests have large measurement error, the authors ask whether they are reliable enough for classifying patients into a treatment and a nontreatment group. For a given certainty level,…

Describes the appropriate control of experiment-wise error rates and the researcher's role in making decisions to control for Type 1 errors. Issues related to level of significance, one- versus two-tailed tests, and the use of multivariate statistics are included. (Author/CT)

Most training programs in education and psychology focus on classical test theory techniques for assessing score dependability. This paper discusses generalizability theory and explores its concepts using a small heuristic data set. Generalizability theory subsumes and extends classical test score theory. It is able to estimate the magnitude of…

The application of generalizability theory to the reliability and error variance estimation for performance assessment scores is discussed. Decision makers concerned with performance assessment need to realize the restrictions that limit generalizability such as limitations that lead to reductions in the number of tasks possible, rater quality,…

The level of confidence in pass/fail decisions obtained with computerized adaptive tests and paper-and-pencil tests was greater for 645 medical technology students when the computer adaptive test implemented a 90 percent confidence stopping rule than for paper-and-pencil tests of comparable length. (SLD)