In recent years there has been an increasing international interest in fine-grained diagnostic inferences on multiple skills for formative purposes. A successful provision of such inferences that support meaningful instructional decision-making requires (a) careful diagnostic assessment design coupled with (b) empirical support for the structure…

The structure of contents by any of the multidimensional scaling methods, including Smallest Space Analysis, and comparisons of such structures cannot be meaningfully studied without reference to the investigated item contents. Except in rare cases, methods that focus only on the spatial distribution of points are not appropriate. (RL)

Detailed reanalyses of data reported in Studies in Educational Evaluation: Monograph No. 1 by Y. Kashti and Monograph No. 5 by U. Kattmann, 1979, were performed using an explicitly structurally oriented approach via target analysis (PINDIS). Results contradict those reached by Kashti and Kattmann. (RL)

School districts in the U.S. increasingly rely on standardized testing to documentstudent achievement in mathematics, reading, science, and English. Educators and policy-makers have engaged in heated debates as to the effects of such standardized testing practices on actual student achievement. In studying these issues, it is important to examine…

Applied qualitative methods to assess students' interest in science to responses of 2,118 German students in grades 5 through 7 to items measuring interest. Each method (additive cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and latent class analysis) is considered qualitative because it supports a focus on the structure of interest. Each approach…

A three-way multidimensional scaling model is presented as a method for identifying classroom cliques, by simultaneous analysis of three variables (for example, chooser/choosen/criteria). Two scaling models--Carroll and Chang's INDSCAL and Lingoes' PINDIS--are presented and applied to two sets of empirical data. (CP)