The target paper, "Rethinking Traditional Methods of Survey Validation" (Andrew Maul), raises some interesting critical ideas, both old and new, about the validation of self-report surveys. As indicated by Dr. Maul, recent policy initiatives in the United States (e.g., ESSA) have led to a demand for assessments of…

In this article, I respond to Noel Card's "Methodological Issues in Measuring the Development of Character." I focus on the ways in which social scientific knowledge represents human constructions of the world and the implications of this stance for the measurement of character. Further, I consider how context influences those…

In recent years, continuing advances in technology have increased the capacity to automate the extraction of a range of linguistic features of texts and thus have provided the impetus for the substantial growth of corpus linguistics. While corpus linguistic tools and methods have been used extensively in second language learning research, they…

This commentary on the article titled "Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers: A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier 1 Teacher Licensure" provides an overview of Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), its relationship to edTPA and…

Ultimately, measures in research, testing, assessment and evaluation are used, or have implications, for ranking, intervention, feedback, decision-making or policy purposes. Explicit recognition of this fact brings the often-ignored and sometimes maligned concept of consequences to the fore. Given that measures have personal and social…

When education works, it creates productive, innovative citizens eager to contribute to a well-functioning democracy. In contrast, educational failure has lifelong consequences, with some individuals experiencing decades of preventable hardship. Dawn Flanagan and Joel Schneider write in this response that, like Kranzler, Floyd, Benson, Zabowski,…

In this article, Hartley notes the difficulties of using questionnaires to assess the efficiency of new instructional methods and highlights nine issues that researchers must consider. Hartley continues the discussion about the use of questionnaires and suggests that psychology teachers can help improve the teaching of psychology by drawing…

This report asserts that tax credit scholarship programs, that distribute scholarships to students via Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs), have saved state treasuries between $1.7 and $3.4 billion dollars since 1998. The report argues that these programs are able to realize fiscal savings as a result of students leaving public schools and…

A response is made to a paper that urges the use of the Rasch model for educational assessment. This paper argues that the model is inadequate and that claims for its efficacy are exaggerated and technically weak.

Assessments used for both clinical practice and research should show evidence of validity and reliability for the target group of people. It is easy to agree with this statement, but it is not always easy to choose the right assessment for the right purpose. Recently there have been increasing numbers of studies which investigate further the…

In "Assessing the Belief Bias Effect With ROCs: It's a Response Bias Effect," Dube, Rotello, and Heit (2010) examined the form of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for reasoning and the effects of belief bias on measurement indices that differ in whether they imply a curved or linear ROC function. We concluded that the ROC…

In their article Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) present a comparative study of some of the different variants of the "h" index. The study evaluates a total of 22 metrics, including the "h" index and "h"-type indices, as well as other conventional measures. The novelty of their work is to a large extent…

Newton's article (2010) makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it is transatlantic, bringing together literatures that have been dealing with similar problems, using sometimes different methods and certainly with distinctive educational, cultural perspectives. He points out that neither of these literatures has all of the…

D'Eon et al. concluded that change in performance self-assessment means from before to after a workshop can detect workshop success in their and other situations. In this commentary, their recommendation is refuted by showing that (a) self-assessments with balanced over- and underestimations are still biased and should not be used to evaluate…

In the May 2010 issue of "Psychological Bulletin," R. E. McGrath, M. Mitchell, B. H. Kim, and L. Hough published an article entitled "Evidence for Response Bias as a Source of Error Variance in Applied Assessment" (pp. 450-470). They argued that response bias indicators used in a variety of settings typically have insufficient data to support such…