Development of purpose is an important goal of post-secondary education. This study advances the measurement of purpose by (a) enriching the construct through incorporating the facet of horizon; (b) providing a framework for Rasch/Guttman Scenario score interpretation; and (c) providing evidence of convergent, divergent, and known groups validity.

This special issue of "Assessment in Education" contains the type of debate needed about what Cizek (2015) calls a "… lingering flaw in the concept of validity…." Some practitioners might not agree that the current theory of validation is flawed. Specifically, the debate Jon Twing is referencing concerns the role of the…

Paul E. Newton provides an insightful and scholarly overview of central issues in validity theory. As he notes, many of the conceptual problems in validity theory derive from the fact that the word "validity" has two meanings. First, it indicates "whether a test measures what it purports to measure." This is a factual claim about the psychometric…

Recently, student outcomes have bubbled to the top of debates about how to evaluate teaching in community and liberal arts colleges, universities, and professional schools, but even more international attention has been riveted on how outcomes are being used to evaluate teachers and administrators K-12 (Harris, 2012; Rowen & Raudenbush, 2016;…

The authors welcome and appreciate the comments of Eric Grodsky and Sigal Alon on their article "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment." In their comments, Grodsky takes issue with several important theoretical and methodological aspects of their article and Alon highlights key processes…

Buchmann, Condron and Roscigno argue in their article, "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment," that the activities in which students engage to prepare for college entrance exams are forms of shadow education, a means by which more advantaged parents seek to pass their privileged status along…

Objective: One suspected source of negative outcomes associated with ADHD has been deficits in executive functions. Although both psychometrically defined and self-reported executive function deficits (EFDs) have been shown to be associated with poor academic and occupational outcomes, whether these two approaches define the same individuals…

Scores on different items of a test are often combined linearly (sometimes with equal weights) to form the test score, mainly for the sake of computational convenience. In this paper, the author studies the consequences of doing this, and also studies the problems involved in finding a suitable linear combination. (Author/RK)

A problem facing investigations of implicit and explicit learning is the lack of valid measures of second language implicit and explicit knowledge. This paper attempts to establish operational definitions of these two constructs and reports a psychometric study of a battery of tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them.…