Over the past decades, the application of Rasch measurement in language assessment has gradually increased. In the present study, we coded 215 papers using Rasch measurement published in 21 applied linguistics journals for multiple features. We found that seven Rasch models and 23 software packages were adopted in these papers, with many-facet…

In 2017, the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) funded Mathematica to conduct the Infant and Toddler Teacher and Caregiver Competencies (ITTCC) project. The project aims to examine existing efforts across states, institutions of higher education, professional organizations, and…

The long-term goal of the State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) and other federal and state early intervention and early childhood education initiatives is improved child and family outcomes. States play a critical role in supporting practitioners in the use of evidence-based practices to improve child and family outcomes. When practitioners…

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…

Objectives: African American urban adolescents are one of the fastest growing groups of children affected by their mother's HIV status. These children experience HIV stigma by association with their HIV-positive mothers. Stigma may contribute to adverse outcomes for these teens. Methods: The authors describe a multistage process of scale…

OBJECTIVITY IN MENTAL TESTING REQUIRES THAT TEST CALIBRATION BE INDEPENDENT OF WHICH PERSONS ARE USED FOR THE CALIBRATION AND THAT PERSON MEASUREMENT BE INDEPENDENT OF WHICH ITEMS ARE USED FOR THE MEASUREMENT. PRESENT PRACTICE IS NOT OBJECTIVE, BUT COULD BE SO, AS SHOWN BY THE EXAMPLE HERE PRESENTED. DATA COME FROM THE RESPONSES OF 976 LAW…

Use of the coefficient of concordance is explained to be a simple technique for estimating reliability in small scale situation and is advocated as a valuable method for physical educators. (GW)

Evaluated the effectiveness of 13 different Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory taking direction techniques. Results indicated that from 10 percent to 81 percent of the variance associated with faking can be accounted for by various detection strategies. These techniques are recommended for clinical use. (Author)

Weighting test scores by appropriateness of confidence, has almost without exception raised the reliability of test scores. Greater gains appear to occur for the less reliable tests, but that is at least partly because the more reliable a test is to begin with, the more difficult it is to improve it. If confidence-testing allows us to weight…

There is more than one reasonable definition of test fairness and these definitions are in conflict; alternate formulations are discussed here. (JB)

A multiple-answer multiple-choice test is one which offers several alternate choices for each stem and any number of those choices may be considered to be correct. In this article, a class of scoring procedures called the binary class is discussed. (Author/JKS)

Within the limitations of the present study, evidence is presented that the use of three-choice items improves the power and discrimination of tests. (PR)

The present investigation was aimed at exploring the stability of the standard score distributions on the GED (General Educational Development) Tests taken by U.S. high school seniors in equating studies conducted by GED Testing Service during the span of 5 years from 2001 (the norming year) to 2005. Three questions were addressed by this…

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)

A study to evaluate seven commonly employed reading comprehension testing techniques in terms of predictive validity, difficulty and discriminability is described. (Author/RM)