One way to fascinate, engage, arouse curiosity, motivate, and stimulate intellectual development in learning scientific concepts is to use counterintuitive questions. These questions make students aware of the inadequacies of their own thinking by exposing them to situations whose outcomes are inconsistent with what they would expect. In this…

Periodic assessment and scrutiny of the discipline's measurement practices, instruments, and research findings are necessary to provide clarity and direction by revealing what we know, how we know it, and where the knowledge gaps exist. Reflective reviews have produced ample appraisals of the theory, research, and methods employed in the conduct…

The test developed in this study was a 60 item multiple-choice test. Content validity was established by the use of The Barrett Taxonomy of Cognitive and Affective Dimensions of Reading Comprehension as a basis for the test construction. Items were selected to represent subtypes in each of the five major areas of the taxonomy. Construct validity…

The question of reliability in the intellectual assessment of young children is cause for concern among developmental psychologists and diagnosticians. The issue of reliability is confounded by normal variability in skills during early childhood, by the problem of consistency across time of age-appropriate assessment measures, and by the selection…

The Residential Checklist portion of the Adaptive Functioning Index was evaluated with 218 individuals with mental retardation in a large Australian residential facility, and found to be both valid and reliable for rating the intellectual and behavioral functioning of individuals, despite some inconsistency in the more subjectively rated measures.…

This paper is a preliminary report of objective test results made by approximately 300 poor and 100 non-poor kindergarten children and by 417 first grade children during 1968-1969. Tests administered to the kindergarten classes in the fall of 1968 and again in the spring of 1969 were: short-form Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence…

Reports on a study designed to: (1) produce a multiple-choice test which would measure children's comprehension of figurative language, and (2) obtain information about the development of figurative language comprehension in children. (Author/AM)

A test battery termed "Assessment of Reading and Language Maturity" (ALARM) contains 15 subtests designed to cover the major and minor elements involved in assessing and promoting progress toward reading-language-thinking and social-emotional maturity. Although still undergoing development, ALARM has been administered to and partially…

THE PURPOSES OF THIS PILOT PROJECT WERE (1) TO ATTEMPT TO EVALUATE THE EFFECT OF THE LOCAL PROGRAM ON BOTH INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN AND THE GROUP AND (2) TO INVESTIGATE THE SENSITIVITY OF THE TEST INSTRUMENTS EMPLOYED IN EVALUATING SUCH A PROGRAM. SIXTY-ONE CHILDREN WERE ENROLLED IN THE LOCAL HEADSTART PROGRAM AND WERE ADMINISTERED THE STANFORD-BINET,…

A comprehensive evaluation of the present state of infant and preschool mental testing in the United States is the concern of this monograph by the Society for Research in Child Development. Literature, technical and professional, covering the concept of intelligence and its measurement, was reviewed, organized, and summarized (chapters II and…

Two models were identified for criterion-referenced tests, one based on the assumption of a continuous achievement variable and the other assuming a dichotomous or binary variable. Several test characteristics were examined and contrasted for the two models, including the distribution of scores, establishment of a cutting score, test length, item…

This text is designed not only as a teaching text but also as a reference source for students and professionals on the assessment of the cognitive development of children. Chapters address: (1) process challenges of assessing children; (2) context challenges in assessing children; (3) ethical, legal, and professional applications of assessment…

The relationship between the difficulty with which the retarded adolescent decodes visual social cues and the appropriateness of his social behavior was the basis of a study to determine whether social cue decoding could be taught the retarded in a manner analogous to the teaching of reading and writing, with beneficial behavioral results. The…