Instruments for assessing secondary students' conceptual understanding of core concepts in biology are needed by educational practitioners and researchers alike. Most instruments available for secondary biology (years 9 to 12) focus only on highly specific biological concepts instead of multiple core concepts. This study describes the development…

A classroom assessment environment is a classroom context experienced by students as the teacher determines assessment purposes, develops assessment tasks, defines assessment criteria and standards, provides feedback, and monitors outcomes (Brookhart, 1997). It is usually a group experience varying from class to class dependent upon the teacher's…

Effective intervention delivery requires ongoing assessment to determine whether students are learning at the desired rate. Intervention programs with embedded assessment procedures (i.e., assessment that occurs naturally "during" the process of delivering intervention) can potentially enhance instructional decisions. However, there is…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct and predictive validity of scores on a measure of social acceptability of class-wide and individual student intervention, the School Intervention Rating Form (SIRF), with high school teachers. Utilizing scores from 158 teachers, exploratory factor analysis revealed a three-factor (i.e.,…

This study was designed to identify the help seeking behaviors of preservice teachers who are at risk for failure of state certification examinations through use of a scale adapted to the arena of teacher education, the Preservice Teacher Help Seeking Scales (PTHSS). In the past, self-report measures of help seeking behavior patterns have been…

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 report examines the availability and quality of predictive validity data for a selection of benchmark assessments identified by state and district personnel as in use within Mid-Atlantic Region jurisdictions. Based on a review of practices within the school districts in the region, this report details the benchmark assessments being used, in…

A constructive debate over the classification of child psychopathology can be stimulated by investigating the validity of different classification approaches. We examined and compared the short-term predictive validity of cluster analytic and dimensional classifications of child behavioral adjustment in school using the Behavior Assessment System…

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…

This study evaluated the validity, reliability, and utility of five of the six subtests of Clay's (2002) Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (OS), including Letter Identification, Word Reading, Writing Vocabulary, Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words, and Text Reading. In addition to a review of studies providing assessment of the…

The Cognitive Profiling System (CoPS 1) is a psychometric assessment/screening system presented in the form of computer games to children in their early school years in order to predict the probability of later learning difficulties of both a general and specific nature (Singleton, Horne, & Thomas, 1999). Although some evidence is available as…