Dynamic assessment (DA) is a generic term for a variety of procedures that embed intervention within the assessment itself. Typically administered in pretest-intervention-posttest format, DA procedures provide information about the response and responsiveness of the individual to intervention and generate ideas and evidence about potentially…

Standard setting methods such as the Angoff method rely on judgments of item characteristics; item response theory empirically estimates item characteristics and displays them in item characteristic curves (ICCs). This study evaluated several indexes of rater fit to ICCs as a method for judging rater accuracy in their estimates of expected item…

We examined the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and the responsiveness of the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency-Second Edition (BOT-2) for children with intellectual disabilities (ID). One hundred children with ID aged 4-12 years tested on 3 separate occasions: two baseline measurements with a 2-week interval before the…

In 2009, a PK-12 public school district board of education approved a teacher evaluation tool developed by a volunteer team of teachers and administrators. The Learning Based Teacher Evaluation (LBTE) was constructed with six broad standards and fifteen specific criteria. The standards and criteria were assumed important to professional practice,…

Quality measurement serves as a foundation for child care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). Understanding the variation that exists in quality measurement, the different contexts in which states make decisions, and the factors that play into their decisions can help administrators identify where their state may fall along the spectrum…

Academic dishonesty has recently been described as an epidemic illness and a phenomenon to be definitely prevented. Accordingly, prospective teachers are expected to have high ethical judgement levels. The section who suffers most from academic dishonesty is also teachers who serve in various ranks. Individuals with high ethical judgement levels…

Although researchers have succeeded in identifying knowledge and skills and personal traits and characteristics of effective leaders, they have not been nearly as successful in identifying or defining those elusive leadership qualities that fall into the affective domain--what the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)…

This article describes the development of a ten-item scale to assess biology majors' self-efficacy towards the critical thinking and data analysis skills taught in an upper-division cell biology course. The original seven-item scale was expanded to include three additional items based on the results of item analysis. Evidence of reliability and…

The Advanced Academic Programs (AAP) of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) enrolls approximately 2,700 part-time graduate students across three physical locations. It is a complex organization whose target audience is a sophisticated consumer of higher education. With the support of Eduventures, AAP…

Item response theory (IRT) and related latent variable models represent modern psychometric theory, the successor to classical test theory in psychological assessment. Although IRT has become prevalent in the measurement of ability and achievement, its contributions to clinical domains have been less extensive. Applications of IRT to clinical…

This article describes the development and utility of the Abel-Blasingame Assessment System for "individuals with intellectual disabilities" (ABID) for assessment of sexual interest and problematic sexual behaviors. The study examined the preliminary psychometric properties and evaluated the clinical utility of the ABID based on a sample…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the reliability and the factor structure of the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (CDSES-SF) among French university students. Based on a sample of 650 respondents, the alpha coefficients indicated high reliability for total scores but not for the subscale scores with values of 0.70 and…

In this article the authors provide practitioners and researchers with three illustrations of how to use systematic screening tools within the context of three-tiered models of support to (a) measure the overall level of risk present in a school over time and (b) identify students who may require more targeted supports in the form of secondary and…

This article describes the development and the initial psychometric evaluation of the Social Issues Advocacy Scale in two studies. In the first study, an exploratory factor analysis (n = 278) revealed a four-factor scale, accounting for 71.4% of the variance, measuring different aspects of social issue advocacy: Political and Social Advocacy,…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Benchmarks has emerged as a competing paradigm for assessing institutional effectiveness vis-a-vis the U.S. News & World Report. However, Porter (2009) has critiqued it for failing to meet validity and reliability standards. This study investigated whether the NSSE five benchmarks had construct…