Test items are designed to be representative of the subject areas that they measure and to reflect the importance of specific domains or item types within those subject areas. Content validity is achieved by content specification and number of items in each content domain included in the design of the test. However, largely due to the normal…

A new instrument was designed by S. Hord (1996) to assess globally the maturity of a school's professional staff as a learning community. The Appalachia Educational Laboratory agreed to field test this instrument to determine its reliability and validity and to draw conclusions about its use in educational improvement. The instrument consisted of…

The Continuous School Improvement Questionnaire (CSIQ) is a comprehensive inventory measuring educators' perceptions of factors that affect success with school improvement. A pilot test of the CSIQ was conducted in Spring 2000, one purpose of which was to reduce the length of the CSIQ. The instrument was reduced from 147 to 72 items. The pilot…

This report describes the results from an exploratory project conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics. The purpose of the project was to develop and field test questionnaire items and related methods designed to capture information about the instructional processes used nationally in 8th- to 12th-grade mathematics classrooms.…

In Rasch terminology, two or more tests are linked when they are joined into a pool related to a single scale. When the same item calibrates at a low level on one test and a high level on a second test, it indicates that the item is low on the first test because the other items on that test are higher, and is high on the second test because the…

In large-scale assessments, some amount of background material is generally collected. Background questionnaires in the National Assessment of Educational Progress are the subject of this report. Most of the questions in NAEP background questionnaires have asked about course taking patterns and course content, but it is argued that the material…

These guidelines are provided to offer guidance to district and state policy makers and assessment directors concerning some issues of managing the development, administration, and use of performance assessments in large scale assessment programs. The term "performance assessment" is used for assessments that go beyond paper-and-pencil,…

This manual is designed to provide teachers with technically sound, easy-to-follow procedures for developing diagnostic tests to be used with their own students. The definition of diagnostic testing is broadened to include any tests systematically designed to provide information about skills that students have or have not mastered. A five-step…

This paper discusses the rationale for enhancing the current National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) design by adding a capacity for adaptive testing. Items are tailored to the achievement level of the student in adaptive testing. The report describes a 1993 Ohio field trail of two-stage assessment carried out by the National Opinion…

This report examines the potential of adaptive testing, two-stage testing in particular, for improving the data quality of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Following a discussion of the rationale for adaptive testing in assessment and a review of previous studies of two-stage testing, this report describes a 1993 Ohio field…

In 1993 teachers in the Virginia Beach (Virginia) public schools asked parents what they think about classroom practices as part of a client satisfaction project. A questionnaire called the Parent Perception Survey was mailed to more than 40,000 homes to ask about parent satisfaction with the teaching their children were receiving. A teacher task…

This publication presents information about the technical characteristics of the 1997 Florida Writing Assessment Program, Grades 4, 8, and 10. Descriptive and statistical information is provided for the census assessment, and the procedures used in prompt development, pilot testing, field testing, scoring, and item banking are reviewed. The…

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has contracted with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research to develop and field test performance assessments in mathematics, language arts, and science. Together with a Wisconsin-developed knowledge and concepts test, the new performance assessments will provide important information about the…

In 1992-93 a client satisfaction plan for teachers was developed and implemented in the Virginia Beach (Virginia) public school system. This report describes the processes of design and implementation as well as preliminary findings from the field test of a survey soliciting parent perceptions of teacher performance. Although students were…

This paper traces the process of designing and administering a structured survey on dropping out of school to demonstrate the means by which working with organizations and their clients impacts research methodology. A dropout accounting system had been developed for the Ysleta Independent School District, a district with an enrollment of 50,000…