Short forms of psychometric scales have been commonly used in educational and psychological research to reduce the burden of test administration. However, it is challenging to select items for a short form that preserve the validity and reliability of the scores of the original scale. This paper presents and evaluates multiple automated methods…

Administration of high-stakes language proficiency tests has been disrupted in many parts of the world as a result of the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic. Institutions that rely on test scores have been forced to adapt, and in many cases this means using scores from a different test, or a new online version of an existing test, that can be taken…

The Test of German as a Foreign Language (TestDaF) plays a critical role as a standardized test of German language proficiency. Developed and administered by the Society for Academic Study Preparation and Test Development (g.a.s.t.), TestDaF was launched in 2001 and has experienced persistent annual growth, with more than 44,000 test takers in…

This article describes an empirical refinement of the "Runco Ideational Behavior Scale" (RIBS). The RIBS seems to be associated with divergent thinking, and the potential for creative thinking, but it was possible that its validity could be improved. With this in mind, three new scales were developed and the unique benefit (or…

The Speed DIAL-4 was developed from the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning, Fourth Edition (DIAL-4), a screening designed to identify children between the ages of 2 years, 6 months through 5 years, 11 months "who are in need of intervention or diagnostic assessment in the following areas: motor, concepts, language,…

A practical concern for many existing tests is that subscore test lengths are too short to provide reliable and meaningful measurement. A possible method of improving the subscale reliability and validity would be to make use of collateral information provided by items from other subscales of the same test. To this end, the purpose of this article…

This article describes the National Center Test for University Admissions, a unified national test in Japan, which is taken by 500,000 students every year. It states that implementation of the Center Test began in 1990, with the English component consisting only of the written section until 2005, when the listening section was first implemented…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (Dunn and Dunn) is described as a convenient, quick test, possessing improvements over the original. It measures a subject's receptive (hearing) vocabulary for Standard American English. However, the validity information for the test is less than adequate, since no validity studies are presented for it.…

A series of computer simulations was run to measure the relationship between testlet validity and the factors of item pool size and testlet length for both adaptive and linearly constructed testlets. Results confirmed the generality of earlier empirical findings of H. Wainer and others (1991) that making a testlet adaptive yields only marginal…

In low-stakes testing, the motivation levels of examinees are often a matter of concern to test givers because a lack of examinee effort represents a direct threat to the validity of the test data. This study investigated the use of response time to assess the amount of examinee effort received by individual test items. In 2 studies, it was found…

Computer simulations were run to measure the relationship between testlet validity and factors of item pool size and testlet length for both adaptive and linearly constructed testlets. Making a testlet adaptive yields only modest increases in aggregate validity because of the peakedness of the typical proficiency distribution. (Author/SLD)

DIMTEST is a statistical test procedure for assessing essential unidimensionality of binary test item responses. The test statistic T used for testing the null hypothesis of essential unidimensionality is a nonparametric statistic. That is, there is no particular parametric distribution assumed for the underlying ability distribution or for the…

The initial development of a testlet-based algebra test was previously reported (Wainer and Lewis, 1990). This account provides the details of this excursion into the use of hierarchical testlets and validity-based scoring. A pretest of two 15-item hierarchical testlets was carried out in which examinees' performance on a 4-item subset of each…

Four main approaches to customized testing are described, and their resulting scores' valid uses and interpretations are discussed. Customized testing can yield valid normative and curriculum-specific information, although cautious application is needed to avoid misleading inferences about student achievement. (SLD)