The process of quantification is a powerful development shaping many domains of life today. In the area of education, for example, performance measurement, testing and ranking have become common tools of governance. Quantification is not a neutral way of describing society, but a process of valorisation. It has three sociologically relevant…

The Program for International Student Assessment Young Adult Follow-up Study (PISA YAFS) is a follow-up study with students who participated in PISA 2012 in the United States. The study is designed to measure how performance on PISA 2012 relates to subsequent measures of outcomes and skills of young adults on an online assessment, Education and…

IES is the primary research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Established through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), the Institute's mission is to expand fundamental knowledge and understanding of education and to provide education leaders and practitioners, parents and students, researchers, and…

The purpose of the research paper was to investigate the effect of eclectic learning approach on the academic achievement and retention of students in English at elementary level. A sample of forty students of 8th grade randomly selected from Government Boys High School Khurram District Karak was used. It was an experimental study and that's why…

The "PISA 2012 Technical Report" describes the methodology underlying the PISA 2012 survey, which tested 15-year-olds' competencies in mathematics, reading and science and, in some countries, problem solving and financial literacy. It examines the design and implementation of the project at a level of detail that allows researchers to…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, which take place every three years, have been designed to collect information about 15-year-old students in participating countries. PISA examines how well students are prepared to meet the challenges of the future,…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects on various aspects of test performance of the information about the relative merits of guessing in relation to such characteristics as sex and intellectual or achievement level of the individual. (Author)

Differential item functioning (DIF), or item bias, occurs when individuals in a focal group respond differently to a test item than do individuals in a reference group even when comparisons are restricted to individuals with similar overall skill levels on the trait in question. It is common in constructing a questionnaire or survey to recommend…

Discusses research conducted to validate six new or completely revised tests in the Ohio vocational achievement testing program. Results showed a high degree of internal consistency at the total test level and at the subtest level as well. (CT)

The potential of the Rasch model to develop scores, on a ratio scale, suitable for interindividual comparisons, from intact groups with disparate distribution characteristics was investigated. The specific problems studied were: (1) the effects of skewed test score distributions on the ability parameter of the Rasch measurement model; (2) the…

Interim results of the American Institutes for Research study on the impact of the ESEA Title VII Spanish/English Bilingual Education Program imply that certain inferences can be made about the program, inferences which are unjustifiable. By providing only statistical averages on a national sample, the report does a serious disservice by failing…

This paper is one of a group that describes the research methodology for an evaluation of individually guided education (IGE) in American elementary schools. The paper covers the first phase activities from solicitation of participants (April 1977) through preparation of final data tapes for the structural equations analysis (September 1978).…

The Follow Through experience is beginning to provide compelling evidence bearing upon important policy issues in compensatory education. This evidence, coming as it does from a naturalistic quasi-experiment, cannot draw its plausibility from the conventional statistical inference appropriate to probabilistically-constructed true experiments. The…

A procedure was developed to detect differential item functioning (DIF) in a standardized essay test using the Partial Credit Model, the general polychotomous form of the Rasch model. Using a panel of experts in the writing process, hypothesized explanations for DIF at some score points were developed. Data for the study included averaged…

The logic of using a gain score approach versus longitudinal causal models is studied in this secondary analysis of a complex data base. The gain score model used by the Federal Reserve Bank and the School District of Philadelphia in their "What Works in Reading?" study is successively refined using the LISREL structural equation…