This article investigates the persistent and change elements of educational testing and assessment from 1920 to the present day. I show by examining the addresses and texts of American Educational Research Association presidents a continuing focus on schools, from early experiments and development up through applications in accountability systems.…

Internationally, over the last 20-30 years, changing the procedures and processes of assessment has come to be seen, by many educators as well as policy-makers, as a way to frame the curriculum and drive the reform of schooling. Such developments have often been manifested in large scale, high stakes testing programmes. At the same time…

There are not enough reading tests standardized on adults who have very low literacy skills, and therefore tests standardized on children are frequently administered. This study addressed the complexities and problems of using a test normed on children to measure the reading comprehension skills of 193 adults who read at approximately third…

Among the five roles--leader, instructional partner, information specialist, teacher, and, program administrator--identified for the school librarian in "Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs" (AASL, 2009), the role of teacher is critical for improving student achievement. The school librarian is uniquely positioned in…

The drop in standardized test scores may be due to the fact that the standardization samples on the basis of whose performance the test norms were established no longer represent the testees to whom the tests are applied. (Author/LS)

A test is administered at the end of a unit. On the basis of test performance mastery status is awarded or withheld. An optimum decision rule is fomulated in terms of degree of success in a referral task. (HG)

The purpose of the analyses reported in this paper was to compare performance on the GED (General Educational Development) Tests, U.S. edition, across three groups of examinees: (a) graduating high school seniors in the GED Tests U.S. 2001 norm group, (b) GED Tests candidates who took one or more tests in the U.S. in 2002-2004, and (c) GED Tests…

"Classroom Assessment in Action" clarifies the multi-faceted roles of measurement and assessment and their applications in a classroom setting. Comprehensive in scope, Shermis and Di Vesta explain basic measurement concepts and show students how to interpret the results of standardized tests. From these basic concepts, the authors then…

Examines the extent to which grades derived from a conventional norm-referenced examination can be interpreted in terms of criterion-referenced performance assessments of different abilities and skills. Results suggest that performance is more affected by test format and subject matter than by the intellectual abilities tested by them. (JOW)

This overview of the Alaska system for test development, scoring, and reporting explored differences and similarities between norm-referenced and standards-based tests. The current Alaska testing program is based on legislation passed in 1997 and 1998, and is designed to meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Legislation. In…

The purposes of this study were (1) to develop norms among American Indian Students for the Vane Kindergarten Test (VKT) and (2) to statistically compare these with the published norms. Sixty-one test results of Sioux Indian children ages 4.6-5.5 were statistically compared with VKT norms. This tabulation of the results indicated that there is no…

A manual is presented to familiarize the teacher with the two major components of the New Mexico evaluation effort: (1) the objective-based procedure and the tests used to measure a school and district's progress toward those objectives, and (2) the statewide testing program which utilizes norm-referenced tests and provides both individual and…

In an attempt to evaluate and minimize the dropout problem 26 noncompleting, two-parent families leaving the Mountain-Plains program prematurely were selected for study on the basis of availability of entry scores on the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) and the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, Form E (16PF). Scores for this group were…

A Friends for Education (FFE) survey revealed that no state is below the norm at the elementary school level on six nationally normed commercially available achievement tests. Tests use a norm group from the past for comparison, but FFE suspects that inaccurate initial norms and teaching the test may cause high scores. (SLD)

Officials of the United States Department of Education conclude that the pervasive "above average" achievement reported by J. J. Cannell (1988) results from a combination of testing practices and procedures among school testing programs. Causative factors of this paradox, dubbed the "Lake Wobegon Phenomenon," are discussed.…