The low-stakes character of international large-scale educational assessments implies that a participating student might at times provide unrelated answers as if s/he was not even reading the items and choosing a response option randomly throughout. Depending on the severity of this invalid response behavior, interpretations of the assessment…

This review looks at these changes and their impact on the quality of the instrument: alteration of age-range from 5-15 to 6-16; development of new norms; improvement of manual in format and function; and a number of old items deleted and new ones added for the subtests. (RC)

Findings on alternative procedures for evaluating measures of achievement in individual data packages at the National Assessment of Educational Progress are presented with their methodological implications. The need for secondary analysts to be aware of the organization of the data, and positive and negative features are discussed. (Author/CM)

The Stanford Achievement Test Forms E and F were judged to be one of the best achievement batteries for assessing basic skills taught in grades one through nine. The test publisher provides several booklets in addition to the administration manual. These include the Norms Booklet, Handbook of Instructional Strategies, and Guide to Classroom…

This study examined the influence of processing strategies, and the metacomponents that determine when to apply them, on the construct validity of a verbal reasoning test. A rule-oriented strategy, an association strategy, and a partial rule strategy were examined. All three strategies contributed to individual differences in verbal reasoning.…

Scores on a multiple-choice language test involving recognition of language errors were related to those on writing samples, scored atomistically for the same language errors and holistically for communicative effectiveness and correctness. Results suggest the need for clear limits in generalizing from one assessment to others. (Author/GK)

An overview is given of the consensus process for development of the frameworks underlying the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments, with emphasis on those for the 1990 and 1992 mathematics assessments, the 1992 reading assessment, and the 1994 science assessments. Innovative techniques for 1992 are described. (SLD)

Studied the meaning that classroom teachers associate with grades, their value judgments, and the role of measurement instruction in their decisions for 40 teachers with and 44 without measurement instruction. Grades are related to student work, and teachers make value judgments when assigning grades. Measurement instruction makes little…

Classroom assessment procedures of 36 teachers in grades 2 to 12 were studied to determine the extent to which they measure students' higher order thinking skills in mathematics, science, social studies, and language arts. A striking finding was the absence of evaluation of comparative and evaluative thinking. (SLD)