This paper examines the purpose, validity, and reliability of performance indicators in higher education, focusing on the experience of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. Specifically, it studies the role of student entry and exit performance, teaching and staff quality, retention and completion, and placement in employment as…

This report provides empirical results of attempts to achieve consistency of estimates between two National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveys, the 1993-94 Private School Survey (PSS) and the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). Comparisons are made among statistical and computational procedures that may achieve the desired consistency…

The Minnesota Test of Critical Thinking (MTCT) has been designed to measure both critical thinking (CT) skills and a key disposition of critical reasoning: the willingness to evaluate arguments that are congruent with one's own goals and beliefs critically. The MTCT uses a taxonomy of CT skills derived from the American Philosophical Association's…

This study examined the psychometric and technical characteristics of various measures of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that are commonly used with preschool-aged children. Information on reliability, validity, norms, and scale-specific features was gathered from the test manuals of four commonly used behavior rating scales: (1)…

The purpose of this paper is to report a successful technique for assessing cooperative group work reliably and validly. The paper demonstrates a simple-to-use assessment procedure that tracks individual accountability, energizes student interaction, and rewards cooperative learning, even as it uses fewer administrative resources than traditional…

This paper aims to make the techniques of cooperative learning more attractive to teachers by presenting a method of assessment that avoids the drawbacks associated with trying to extract valid and reliable individual marks from cooperative performances. The paper presents an easy-to-use method of assessing an individual's contribution to a…

This paper focuses on teacher testing issues related to job analysis, test specification development, reliability, and validity. It emphasizes the conceptualization and operational definition of appropriate validity evidence to assess the quality of licensure testing decisions. It is suggested that the process of job, or practice, analysis would…

The purpose of the current study was to use multilevel modeling to quantify and explain the sources of score variation in standardized patient (SP) encounters. Through laypersons trained to portray SPs and record medical student actions, SP examinations allow the measurement of examinees' clinical and interpersonal skills. In this study, the SP…

Knowledge mapping is expected to measure deep conceptual understanding and allow students to characterize relationships among concepts in a domain visually. This research examined the validity of knowledge mapping as an assessment tool in science. The approach to investigating this validity was three-pronged. First, a model was outlined for the…

In a problem-based curriculum, emphasis is placed on the groups in which students learn to analyze problems and to contribute to the solution of a problem. This paper describes an instrument that aims to measure individual group performing and presents some psychometric results. Reliability and validity were studied with 240 students in groups of…

The goal of this study was to assess the statistical health of educational psychology literature, both current and past, to: (1) determine the range of effect sizes observed in the current literature (1998-1999); (2) determine the range of observed (or a posteriori) power in the current literature; (3) compare these two statistics to that of the…

The construct validity of the New Standards middle school Science Reference Examination was studied focusing on evidence related to the internal and external structure of the assessment, the reliability of the assessment scores, and the generalizability of the assessment results. Data for 450 students were taken from the field test in spring 1998.…

A metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedure based on computer-subject interaction is developed, and an experiment designed to validate the procedure is presented. (Author)

Author expresses concern about a number of problems inherent in the DD and A processes as they now exist in education and feels that educational practitioners making changes and innovations need to be protected from research and evaluation reports of poor quality. (Author/MB)