The Survey of Physics Reasoning on Uncertainty Concepts in Experiments (SPRUCE) was designed to measure students' proficiency with measurement uncertainty concepts and practices across ten different assessment objectives to help facilitate the improvement of laboratory instruction focused on this important topic. To ensure the reliability and…

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…

A method for medical screening is adapted to differential item functioning (DIF). Its essential elements are explicit declarations of the level of DIF that is acceptable and of the loss function that quantifies the consequences of the two kinds of inappropriate classification of an item. Instead of a single level and a single function, sets of…

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…

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…

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…

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)

Provides information on statistical data and jargon so that English department members can more confidently and responsibly identify the inevitable weaknesses and limitations of both tests of writing ability and the research on them. (RL)

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…

The impact of the Subset Selection Technique (SST) for multiple-choice items on certain properties of a test was compared with that of two other methods, the Number Right and the Correction for Guessing Formula. Results indicated that SST outperformed the other two, producing higher reliability and validity without favoring high risk takers.…

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge. The material is organized into five units: (1) introduction to measurement theory; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) item analysis in test development; and (5) test scoring and…

The goal of test design is to devise an instrument that will provide a stable and accurate assessment of student ability in some area. One means of reaching this goal is through the use of latent trait models, which determine the relationship between the unobservable trait or ability and the observable test performance. Three common latent trait…

Explores the relationship between measurement theory and practice, considering five broad categories of: (1) models, assumptions, and terminology; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) scaling; and (5) setting performance standards. It must be recognized that measurement is not an end in itself. (SLD)

Tested validity of the Portuguese version of the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation questionnaire. Found results similar to original French-Canadian instrument in stability, internal consistency, and factorial structure. Found associations between teacher's description of social competence and behavioral difficulties in Brazilian…