This focus article provided the author with an opportunity to unpack the consensus definition of validity and to explore its implications in the light of recent debates. He proposed an elaboration of the consensus definition, which was intended to express the spirit of the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" with increased…

This article describes the 2009 revision of the Dutch Rating System for Test Quality and presents the results of test ratings from almost 30 years. The rating system evaluates the quality of a test on seven criteria: theoretical basis, quality of the testing materials, comprehensiveness of the manual, norms, reliability, construct validity, and…

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…

Many individuals who attempt to enter teacher education programs are precluded from doing so because of an inability to pass basic skills tests. The authors examine whether these tests are simply a gate that needs to be passed through or whether they provide useful early information about how individuals are likely to perform on subsequent…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

The authors investigated the extent to which taking specific types of Advanced Placement (AP) courses and the number of courses taken predicts the likelihood of passing subject benchmarks and earning a score of 19 on the composite score on the ACT test, and examined the role gender plays in the projection. They found evidence that taking an AP…

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…

This paper will describe the relationships between research on learning and its application in assessment models and operational systems. These have been topics of research at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) for more than 20 years and form a significant part of the intellectual foundation of…

This paper updates the concept of test validity. This new conception entails a set of 10 categories combined together in pairs: curriculum and instructional validity, statutory and forensic validity, media and journalistic validity, political and legislative validity, and partisan and activist validity. (Author/DWH)

There is a growing body of literature linking curriculum based measurements and general outcome measures to state test outcomes. With an increasing focus on the early identification of students at risk for academic failure, the present study investigated the predictive validity of preschool early literacy general outcome measures (GOMs) in a low…

The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability, validity, and predictive utility of 3 measures for screening kindergarten students for risk for math difficulty (MD). The screening measures assessed number sense and computational fluency, constructs central to typical early mathematical development. Conceptual and operational outcomes…

A new variant of the standard method for estimating the accuracy of educational tests is examined. It is found that the estimates produced by the new method are essentially unbiased and that the typical sizes of the errors of the estimates approach their theoretical lower limit as size increases, though they are still noticably above it for small…

Empirical Bayes methods are shown to provide a practical alternative to standard least squares methods in fitting high dimensional models to sparse data. An example concerning prediction bias in educational testing is presented as an illustration. (Author)

A study evaluated different approaches to placing students in adult literacy classes using 168 adult basic education (ABE) and General Educational Development (GED) students. Students in classes at Rochambeau School in White Plains, New York, were given the Tests of Adult Basic Education (TABE), the Tests of Adult Literacy Skills (TALS), an oral…