The assessment of young children in early childhood special education is a central area of educational practice. The results of child assessments often have significant implications for young children, their families, and the programs that serve them, including eligibility for special education services, instructional planning, and documentation…

Scores are the most visible and widely used products of a testing program. The choice of score scale has implications for test specifications, equating, and test reliability and validity, as well as for test interpretation. At the same time, the score scale should be viewed as infrastructure likely to require repair at some point. In this report…

Techniques for classifying individuals into mastery or non-mastery status based on criterion-referenced test performance are investigated. Extensions of mastery classification techniques developed by Macready and Dayton are presented. The techniques are based on latent class and quasi-independence models. (Author/JKS)

When comparing examinees to a control group or person, the examiner usually does not know the probability of correct classification based on the number of items used and the number of people tested. Using ranking and selection techniques, a framework is described for deriving a lower bound on this probability. (Author/JKS)

Seventeen statistics for measuring the reliability of criterion-referenced tests were critically reviewed. The review was organized into two sections: (1) a discussion of preliminary considerations to provide a foundation for choosing the appropriate category of "reliability" (threshold loss function, squared-error loss-function, or…

Examines the extent to which grades derived from a conventional norm-referenced examination can be interpreted in terms of criterion-referenced performance assessments of different abilities and skills. Results suggest that performance is more affected by test format and subject matter than by the intellectual abilities tested by them. (JOW)

There are two major aspects to the cutoff score issue in criterion-referenced (CR) measurement: whether a cutoff score is actually needed for a CR test, and the method for setting the cutoff score if one is used. There are many factors to be considered in determining a cutoff score. While cutoff scores are very often set arbitrarily (e.g., 80%),…

Principles are established for reaching valid decisions as to whether evaluative judgments should be norm referenced or criterion referenced. A set of decision rules is presented, in flow chart form, to serve as a guide to the decision-making process. The use of these decision rules is illustrated for a variety of practical situations. The…

The problem of determining an optimal passing score for a mastery test is discussed, when the purpose of the test is to predict success on an external criterion. For the case of constant losses for the two possible error types, a method for determining passing scores is derived. (Author/JKS)

This paper presents a strategy for measuring cognitive gains in reading during the early school years. It is argued that accurate estimates of gain scores and their appropriate interpretation requires the use of adaptive tests with multiple criterion referenced points that mark learning milestones. It is further argued that two different measures…

A distinction is made between reliability of measurement and reliability of classification; the "criterion-referenced reliability coefficient" describes the former. Application of this coefficient to the probability distribution of possible scores for a single student yields a meaningful way to describe the reliability of a single score. (Author)

A procedure is described for the determination of individual mastery scores when instructional units are sequenced in a linear hierarchy. It can be used when data for the entire sequence have been obtained. The process entails working backwards, from the final test to the first. (Author/JKS)

Since the primary purpose of classical testing is to rank order examinees consistently, the absolute value of the true score has been relatively unimportant. However, the major purpose of criterion referenced testing is to estimate the true capabilities of examinees to perform specific tasks. Hence, the problems of true score determination assume…

Addressing Glass' argument (EJ 198 842) that a lack of interrelater reliability is an inherent deficiency in the Nedelsky technique, poor rater training and the need for a group decision procedure are presented as standard setting problems. (CM)

This paper proposes that instructional validity (i.e., the extent to which teachers actually teach the skills that are tested) should be part of the test development process. The development of a district-wide ninth-grade math exam for General Mathematics I (GMI) in the Charleston County School District, South Carolina, is used to illustrate how a…