There is a major trend in engineering education to provide students with realistic hands-on learning experiences. This paper reports on the results of work done to develop standardized test instruments to use for student learning outcomes assessment in an experiential hands-on manufacturing engineering and technology environment. The specific…

Purpose: With no existing gold standard for comparison, challenges arise for establishing the validity of a new standardized Mandarin language assessment normed in mainland China. Method: A new assessment, Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (DREAM), was normed with a stratified sample of 969 children ages 2;6 (years;months)…

Houston's experience with the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (R) (EVAAS) raises questions that other districts should consider before buying the software and using it for high-stakes decisions. Researchers found that teachers in Houston, all of whom were under the EVAAS gun, but who taught relatively more racial minority students,…

As state tests of student achievement are used for an increasingly wide array of high- and low-stakes purposes, evaluating their instructional sensitivity is essential. This article uses data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Project to examine the instructional sensitivity of 4 states' mathematics and English…

This article describes the development of an instrument to assess beliefs about standardized testing in schools, a topic of much heated debate. The Beliefs About Standardized Testing scale was developed to measure the extent to which individuals support high-stakes standardized testing. The 9-item scale comprises three subscales which measure…

Including students with special educational needs in learning (SEN-L) is a challenge for large-scale assessments. In order to draw inferences with respect to students with SEN-L and to compare their scores to students in general education, one needs to assure that the measurement model is reliable and that the same construct is measured for…

As part of Washington State's efforts to ensure and improve the quality of the teacher workforce, the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB), with assistance from Educational Testing Services (ETS), has recently introduced a new, evidence-based assessment of teachers called the ProTeach Portfolio. The development of ProTeach was mandated by…

None of the several objective indices of cultural bias shows any significant indication of bias in any of the standardized tests of intelligence examined when they are used with blacks and whites. (Author/IRT)

During the past few years the problem of bias in testing has become an increasingly important issue. In most research, bias refers to the fair use of tests and has thus been defined in terms of an outside criterion measure of the performance being predicted by the test. Recently however, there has been growing interest in assessing bias when such…

Evidence on how the psychometric properties of verbal and quantitative academic aptitude tests are affected when item options are weighted using rather simple conceptual procedures is presented. This is discussed in connection with the scoring methods used on the Graduate Record Examinations. (DG)

Guidance decisions depend on the validity of standardized tests and teacher judgment records as measures of student achievement. To test this validity, a sample of 400 high school juniors, randomly selected from two large Gulf Coas t area schools, were administered the Iowa Tests of Educational Development. The nine subtest scores and each…

Standardized achievement tests and instructional accomplishment inventories involve different methodologies and cannot be equated by using conventional psychometric methods. Instructional accomplishment inventories are descriptive, and are designed to reflect the scope, sequence, and skills and emphasis in a particular instructional program.…

An analysis was made of quality ratings of elementary level standardized tests. Applying multidimensional scaling to intercorrelations of quality ratings, it was found that the criterion of content and construct validity was a central element in the evaluation of elementary tests. In addition, several types of validity and reliability were found…