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…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

The article discusses issues relating to the international use of personality inventories, especially those in which organizations make comparisons between people from differing cultures or countries or those with different languages. The focus is on the issue of norming and the use of national versus multinational norms. It is noted that…

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…

Analyzed average performance changes between tested grades for Hawaiian students who took the Stanford Achievement Test from 1992 to 1996. These local norms for Hawaii provide tools to improve the understanding of the performance of Hawaiian students relative to their mainland counterparts. (SLD)

Using the assumption of randomly parallel tests and concepts from generalizability theory, three signal/noise ratios for domain-referenced tests are developed, discussed, and compared. The three ratios have the same noise but different signals depending upon the kind of decision to be made as a result of measurement. (Author/JKS)

Personality scores were used to construct three databases of global norms. The composition of the three databases varied according to percentage of cases by global region, occupational group, applicant status, and gender of the job candidate. Comparison of personality scores across the three norms databases revealed that the magnitude of the…

Scores on the male and female scales of the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory were compared for college students (N=525) to evaluate the claim that male scales should be used with female counselees. Both sexes scored higher on opposite-sex scales. Score relationships support using only same-sex score interpretations with counselees. (Author)

Six methods of scoring multiple true-false items were compared in terms of reliabilities, difficulties, and discrimination. Results suggest that, for norm-referenced score interpretations, there is insufficient evidence to support any one of the methods as superior. For criterion-referenced score interpretations, effects of scoring method must be…

With the growth of globalization, organizations are facing an increased challenge to manage talent, improve employee engagement, develop effective teams, create succession pipelines, and increase organizational effectiveness in multinational settings. Given the need to evaluate and compare individuals from more than one country using standardized…

Problems which arise when criterion referenced test results are used to evaluate the effects of an elementary school reading program are discussed. Topics include: alternative methods of analyzing test results, sensitivity of the instrument to program outcomes, and comparison of criterion referenced and norm referenced achievement test data.…

A major challenge that decisions makers face in multi-national organizations is how to compare managers from different parts of the globe. This challenge is both psychometric and practical. We draw on the cross-cultural psychology literature to propose a three-step framework to compare personality data from different countries. The first step…

This paper delineates several problems which arise when criterion-referenced test results are used to evaluate the effects of a specific educational treatment. Focus is on these topics: (1) the aggregation of individual students' data on objectives, (2) the sensitivity of the instrument to instruction, (3) the interpretation of…

While much has been written on the topic of criterion-referenced testing and consequently its comparison with norm-referenced testing, measurement specialists have not as readily approached the subject of the implications involved in reporting such test information. The purposes of this paper are to (1) draw distinctions between criterion and…

With the increasing globalization of human resources practices, a commensurate increase in demand has occurred for multi-language ("global") personality norms for use in selection and development efforts. The combination of data from multiple translations of a personality assessment into a single norm engenders error from multiple sources. This…