This research aimed to develop a valid and reliable test to be used to detect sixth grade students' misconceptions and errors regarding the subject of fractions. A misconception diagnostic test has been developed that includes the concept of fractions, different representations of fractions, ordering and comparing fractions, equivalence of…

There is an increasing demand for assessments that can provide more fine-grained information about examinees. In response to the demand, diagnostic measurement provides students with feedback on their strengths and weaknesses on specific skills by classifying them into mastery or nonmastery attribute categories. These attributes often form a…

Large-scale assessments are supported by a large item pool. An important task in test development is to assign items into scales that measure different characteristics of individuals, and a popular approach is cluster analysis of items. Classical methods in cluster analysis, such as the hierarchical clustering, K-means method, and latent-class…

Social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SPCD) is a new diagnostic category (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) that describes individuals with severe deficits in social communication who do not also meet the criteria for repetitive, restricted behaviors and interests (RRBI) that would qualify them for a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum…

This article surveys the examination requirements for attaining degree candidate (candidacy) status in computer science doctoral programs at all of the computer science doctoral granting institutions in the United States. It presents a framework for program examination requirement categorization, and categorizes these programs by the type or types…

Two sampling-and-classification-based procedures were developed for automated test assembly: the Cell Only and the Cell and Cube methods. A simulation study based on a 540-item bank was conducted to compare the performance of the procedures with the performance of a mixed-integer programming (MIP) method for assembling multiple parallel test…

The purpose of this article was to describe an initial step developing a new scale to identify individuals with learning disabilities (LD) and test anxiety. Eighty-eight students answered the "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2" (MMPI-2). The participants were drawn from the following three groups: (a) adults with LD and test…

We examined the health status of 171 countries by employing factor analysis on various national health indicators for the period 2000-2005 to construct two new measures on health. The first measure is based on the health of individuals and the second on (the quality of) the health services. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…

The Anamnestic Comparative Self Assessment (ACSA) measure of subjective well-being (SWB) aims to reduce the problems of cultural bias and relativity to external standards by allowing people to define the endpoints or "anchors" of the measurement scale. In medical terminology anamnestic denotes "based on memory". The ACSA uses…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate seven reading comprehension tests according to the construct of comprehension which they claimed to measure. The 367 items from these tests were classified by two judges according to the following four levels indicated on a reading comprehension taxonomy: recognition and recall, inference, evaluation, and…

Examines the implications of cognitive psychology for some of the fundamental components of instructional development. Behaviorism and information processing are compared in their relationships to instructional design, and potential changes for such ideas as objectives, evaluation, instructional taxonomies, content analysis, and instructional…

The resources necessary to create, administer, and score performance assessments in science were studied. RAND and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) designed performance tasks for science in grades five and six as part of a larger study of the feasibility of science performance assessment. Tasks were developed in pairs in task…

A review of the literature on a variety of issues related to testing vocabulary knowledge in a second language addresses these topics: problems in estimating vocabulary size, including the related questions of what constitutes a word, how a sample should be selected, and what are the criteria for knowing a word; sampling the basic and specialized…