A two-dimensional patient management problem test was designed to measure third-year optometry students' clinical competency at Pacific University (Oregon). Results suggest this evaluation method is valid and may be useful in identifying students needing to improve their clinical thinking skills. Some issues in test administration and scoring…

Reports on a two-part study of second-grade African American students' uses of various forms of the /-s/ suffix, replicating J. Torrey's 1972 study on the correlation of language and educational achievement. Findings suggest the need to reflect diversity and flexibility in design and implementation of assessment and instruction materials and the…

The five articles of this theme issue focus on new developments in the evaluation of science education programs that have both substantive and theoretical implications for the field of evaluation. Past and current evaluation approaches are reviewed, and an overview is given of new assessments consistent with new curriculum developments. (SLD)

This review of the Test of Early Written Language concludes that the test succeeds in identifying students who are below their peers in writing and in measuring long-term gains in written language achievement; but its format makes it difficult to document specific strengths and weaknesses and its reliability; and validity have not been…

Discusses the current state of student evaluation in Scotland. Describes elementary school evaluations as consisting of external tests and teacher assessments to be thought of in linear terms. Examines the more formal assessment structure of secondary schools for academic and vocational education. Concludes that evaluation has had little impact on…

Analysis of scores of 118 visually impaired children on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Revised) and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence (Revised) found a consistent response pattern suggesting that the verbal as well as the performance tests provide useful assessment information. (Author/DB)

Adherence to the arbitrary 0.05 level of significance as a benchmark for decisions about publishing research largely accounts for the popularity of one-tailed hypothesis tests. Effect size estimates, accompanied by confidence intervals or exact two-tailed probabilities, are generally more compatible with the growing meta-analytic view of social…

The focus is on partitioning the evaluation of the consequences of assessment programs among the sponsors, developers, users, and reviewers of tests. Five parties that share responsibility are discussed: (1) the state legislature, (2) the state board of education, (3) the school district, (4) the test publisher, and (5) the measurement profession.…

This volume provides the background of the Kentucky Education Reform Act and discusses the assessment and evaluation principles on which it is based. It reviews early steps in implementation of the Act's mandates, but was written before most of the battles of implementation had begun. (SLD)

Discussion of the teaching of learning strategies focuses on a study of undergraduates that investigated the effects of comprehension-directed and memory-directed computer-based learning strategy training on the achievement of learning objectives. Treatment of experimental and control groups is explained, and further research is suggested.…

This article describes results for students with mild disabilities who participated in the Kansas science assessment involving cooperative groups. Individual achievement, attitude, and project scores were consistent with expectations in relation to results for general education students. The study did not find that participation of students with…

Identifies the major principles of general assessment theory, examines how these principles can be applied to online environments for distance education, and describes assessment issues that have special significance in virtual classrooms. Discusses proctored testing, identity security, academic honesty, and use of online discussions for…

This paper examines the content of The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (1990). This report is not a statistical review. Instead it brings under scrutiny the content of the exam. This content will be of interest to the general reader, because the issues range from logic to ethics to pedagogy, and to questions of evidential and…

Over the last 20 years, writing about technology (and more recently about its use in assessment systems) has been a joyful experience, in part because the author was usually right about how fast and how unexpected technology progress would be made. In this article, the author suggests to rethink assessment systems from design perspectives and the…

Often quantitative data in the social sciences have only ordinal justification. Problems of interpretation can arise when least squares multiple regression (LSMR) is used with ordinal data. Two ordinal alternatives are discussed, dominance-based ordinal multiple regression (DOMR) and proportional odds multiple regression. The Q[superscript 2]…