With the United States' adoption of a standards-based approach to education, most attention has focused on the large-scale, high-stakes assessments intended to measure students' mastery of standards for accountability purposes. Less attention has been paid to the role of standards-based assessments in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to…

The use of standards-based classroom assessments to test English learners' language proficiency is increasingly prevalent in the United States and many other countries. In a large urban school district in California, for example, a classroom assessment is used to make high-stakes decisions about English learners' progress from one level to the…

This is a construct validation study of a second language speaking assessment that reported a language profile based on analytic rating scales and a composite score. The study addressed three key issues: score dependability, convergent/discriminant validity of analytic rating scales and the weighting of analytic ratings in the composite score.…

The United States Court Interpreters Act (US Congress, 1978) requires that interpreters in US federal courts be certified through a criterion-referenced performance test. The Federal Court Interpreter Certification Examination (FCICE) is a two-phase certification battery for federal court interpreters. Phase I is a multiple-choice Written…