Tasks are the most visible element in an educational assessment. Their purpose, however, is to provide evidence about targets of inference that cannot be directly seen at all: what examinees know and can do, more broadly conceived than can be observed in the context of any particular set of tasks. This paper concerns issues in an assessment design…

This report examines the belief that education administration (EA) has attracted students of below-average verbal, quantitative, and analytic scores, as measured by standardized tests. The paper makes two assertions: principals as school leaders need academic credibility to relate with teachers as "critical friends," and successful…

Time limits on tests often prevent some examinees from finishing all of the items on the test; the extent of this effect has been called the "speededness" of the test. Traditional speededness indices focus on the number of unreached items. Other examinees in the same situation rapidly fill in answers in the hope of getting some of the…