The primary goal of teaching is to successfully facilitate learning. Testing can help accomplish this goal in two ways. First, testing can provide a powerful motivation for students to prepare when they perceive that the effort involved leads to valued outcomes. Second, testing can provide instructors with valuable feedback on whether their…

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the…

Pigeons' choice in concurrent chains can adapt to rapidly changing contingencies. Grace, Bragason, and McLean (2003) found that relative initial-link response rate was sensitive to the immediacy ratio in the current session when one of the terminal-link fixed-interval schedules was changed daily according to a pseudorandom binary sequence (e.g.,…

This "toolbox" offers suggestions about how and when to create objective tests. Such tests are sometimes a quick way to find out how students are doing, and sometimes they help students focus on what they are doing in class or help teachers define the content that is worth knowing. The following suggestions are offered for developing objective…

Following the rules and regulations of compensatory education programs requires the use of objective measures in selecting students for programs, assessing their progress, and monitoring the program's quality. Administrators must remember the following four points when they use test scores for compensatory education students: (1) test scores alone…

A variety of methods are examined that teachers from preschool to graduate school levels can use in assessing their students; the common principles underlying classroom assessment are explored. The first principle is that the primary purpose of classroom assessment is to inform teaching and improve learning. A second principle is that multiple…