Background: School feeding programs' evaluation requires the measurement of food insecurity, a more objective indicator, within school in low-income countries. The Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) uses subjective indicators to report school feeding coverage rates across many countries that participate in the global survey of school meal…

This study compares the psychometric utility of Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) for scale construction with data from higher education student surveys. Using 2008 Your First College Year (YFCY) survey data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, two scales…

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students…

Psychometric practice does not always converge with the advances of psychometric theory. In order to investigate this gap, the authors focus on the 10 most used psychological tests in Europe, as identified by recent surveys. The article analyzes test manuals published in 6 different European countries for these 10 most used tests. A total of 32…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…

The axioms of a three-set Guttman simplex model are presented and the effects of relaxing the axioms for one of the three sets are examined. This model can be used to define longitudinal developmental scales. (NSF)

A chain of lower bound inequalities leading to the greatest lower bound to reliability is established for the internal consistency of a composite of unit-weighted scores (such as a test). Algorithms for obtaining various reliability coefficients are presented. (Author/JKS)

Reading comprehension involves a number of distinctly different intellectual skills that can be assessed if the proper techniques are employed. As part of a reading assessment system, two measures of literal comprehension were developed: the Literal Comprehension Details Test (LCDT) and the Paraphrase Reading Test (PRT). Both the LCDT and the PRT…

The impact of item response theory (IRT) on the measurement practitioner is discussed, with a review of potential benefits. The complexity of IRT theory and procedures and the lack of robustness of IRT procedures to violation of assumptions must be recognized for the measurement practitioner to realize its advantages. (SLD)

In an attempt to restore the symmetry and balance between the study of person and item variation, this paper presents a novel methodology construct specification equations, which allows one to ascertain from the lawful behavior of items what an instrument is measuring. (Author/PN)

Binomial models for domain-referenced testing are compared, emphasizing the assumptions underlying the beta-binomial model. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed. A proposed item sampling model is presented which takes the effect of guessing into account. (Author/CM)

Focusing on the use of "paper and pencil" criterion-referenced tests in educational measurement, and to correct misconceptions, the definitions of basic terms and historical antecedents are discussed. Classifications of the tests are compared with other achievement tests. The phases in developing criterion-referenced tests are presented with the…

Test theory encompasses models and methods for drawing inferences about what students know and can do, cast in a framework of ideas from measurement, education, and psychology. The emerging paradigm of cognitive psychology prompts new considerations about collecting and interpreting evidence, suggesting alternative models for the nature,…

On the basis of the characteristics of criterion-referenced tests, the contribution of German research to the development and application of criterion-referenced tests is discussed. (PN)

Currently there are at least four pretreatment-posttreatment (pre-post) difference score methods for determining client change. A fifth model, based on a random effects model and multiwave data, represents a growth curve approach and was hypothesized to be more sensitive to detecting significant (p<.05) change than pre-post models. Compares…