Clinical guidance documents play an important role in ensuring access to high-quality autism spectrum disorder diagnostic assessment practices. The objective was to perform a systematic review of professional association and government clinical guidance documents for autism spectrum disorder diagnostic assessment, analyzing their quality and…

Range restrictions, or raters' tendency to limit their ratings to a subset of available rating scale categories, are well documented in large-scale teacher evaluation systems based on principal observations. When these restrictions occur, the ratings observed during operational teacher evaluations are limited to a subset of the available…

In this commentary, I consider the three empirical studies in this special issue based on two main aspects: (a) the nature of the learning progressions and (b) what formative assessment practice(s) were investigated. Specifically, I describe differences among the learning progressions in terms of scope and grain size. I also identify three…

The purpose of this study was to develop a concise composite measure of mindset and intellectual development in order to inform pedagogical strategies to support students' intellectual growth. A development sample of undergraduate students (n = 295) completed the 37-item pilot Mindset and Intellectual Development Scale (MINDS). The dataset was…

This study examined a holistic admissions review process at one institution to determine whether variance occurred and, if so, possible explanations for it. The study analyzed reader reviews for approximately 15,000 individual undergraduate admission reviews over three years. The primary method was focused on the variance and inter-rater…

In its purest form, the purpose of assessment is to use evidence to give an account of and improve student learning, but assessment is rarely practiced in its purest form. For many staff and faculty in higher education, assessment is something they are asked or, more likely, required to do. The reason is because some external entity has required…

With the upcoming review of the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and the removal of National Standards, it is time to reconsider how we approach assessment. In this edition of Assessment News I argue that it is time to put assessment for learning (AfL) and the assessment-capable teacher and student "front and…

Metrics including Cohen's kappa, precision, recall, and F[subscript 1] are common measures of performance for models of discrete student states, such as a student's affect or behaviour. This study examined discrete model metrics for previously published student model examples to identify situations where metrics provided differing perspectives on…

This article is a written version of the Presidential Address I gave at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in April 2017. It is a call to NCME members (and others who read this, of course) to rebalance their focus so that classroom assessments are seen as being at least as important as large-scale…

Traditional pre-test (TpT)/post-test (PT) and retrospective pre-test (RpT)/post-test (PT) designs are used to collect data on self-reported measures to assess the magnitude of change that occurs from interventions. If measurement invariance does not exist across the measurement occasions within these research designs, it is inappropriate to…

This review examines the external systems in place to assure the quality of higher education in Brazil. It highlights the relative success of the Brazilian quality assurance model in regulating market entry for private operators in Brazil, which cater to over 70% of students. But it also calls into question the effectiveness of existing systems to…

In Huggins-Manley & Han (2017), it was shown that WLSMV global model fit indices used in structural equating modeling practice are sensitive to person parameter estimate RMSE and item difficulty parameter estimate RMSE that results from local dependence in 2-PL IRT models, particularly when conditioning on number of test items and sample size.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze and explore the effectiveness of using balanced scorecard (BSC) as a management tool in the evaluation of the performance and thereby the quality services of a University. Design/methodology/approach: The survey was conducted among the various faculties and departments Sohar University through a…

This research provides evidence that the flipped classroom instructional format increases student final exam performance, relative to the traditional instructional format, in a large lecture principles of economics course. The authors find that the flipped classroom directly improves performance by 0.2 to 0.7 standardized deviations, depending on…

This article looks at how colonialism has contributed to the racialized history of Indigenous people by unethical diagnostic implementations of categories and classifications, while overlooking exceptionalities when assessing Indigenous people. By understanding how settler-colonial assessments and/or diagnostic tests have been developed and…