The city-wide standardized testing program of Madison Public Schools was reviewed by a committee of a cross-section of school system educators as part of a total effort to design a testing program more sensitive to the needs of the system. As a result, standardized testing was reduced to reading (grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8) and mathematics (grade…

Michigan's superintendent of public instruction is convinced that a state testing program can provide the kind of information educators need to improve instructional planning. (Author)

Presents survey results of 24 examination boards concerning their positions on the use of electronic calculators in exams. (CP)

This digest discusses sources of error in testing, several approaches to estimating reliability, and several ways to increase test reliability. Reliability has been defined in different ways by different authors, but the best way to look at reliability may be the extent to which measurements resulting from a test are characteristics of those being…

Sound testing practices and the high-quality information that can result are helpful to those who have oversight, responsibility, or interest in American education. To the extent that tests provide high-quality information, they form the basis for making accurate judgments about individual students. It is equally true, however, that factors which…

Educational accountability demands that students take tests. Parents and guardians, being committed to their children's academic success, often ask teachers and other educators questions about tests and testing procedures. This chapter provides practical, straightforward responses to many of the questions parents and guardians ask about testing.…

This study was designed to compare the performance on selected intelligence tests of a group of Canadian Indian children who had never been to school with the performance of a similar group of children who were attending school regularly. (Author/RK)

It appears that contingent reinforcement may have an effect upon the intelligence test performance of black adults as evidenced by the consistent trend of the IQ scores in the direction of the proposed hypothesis. However, the primary analysis of the data revealed no statistically significant differences among treatment groups. (Author)

Proposes a class of locally dependent latent trait models for responses to psychological and educational tests. Focuses on models based on a family of conditional distributions, or kernel, that describes joint multiple item responses as a function of student latent trait, not assuming conditional independence. Also proposes an EM algorithm for…

Discusses the factors affecting the decision to use computerized adaptive testing in a nursing certification examination. (SLD)

The 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing eliminated concepts of content, criterion-related, and construct validity, instead focusing on evidence based on test content, response processes, internal structure, relations to other variables, and consequences of testing. Questions remain about amount of evidence needed,…

The purpose of this study was to build upon Askins's 2002 research by examining the perceptions of Georgia educators as it relates to the instructional leadership role of the principal in helping 11th- and 12th-grade teachers adjust to the newly implemented Georgia Performance Standards and high-stakes testing. This study used qualitative-dominant…

Robert Coe has claimed that three broad conceptions of comparability can be identified from the literature: performance, statistical and conventional. Each of these he rejected, in favour of a single, integrated conception which relies upon the notion of a "linking construct" and which he termed "construct comparability".…