Many attempts are currently being made to develop Aural-Oral Communicative skills in English at school level, but it remains a difficult task for the teachers of English. There are a lot of readymade cassettes available in the market but they have hardly served the purpose. Admittedly, cassettes help and yield better results for learners, subject…

A standard-setting procedure was developed for the Georgia Teacher Certification Testing Program as tests in 30 teaching fields were revised. A list of important characteristics of a standard-setting procedure was derived, drawing on the work of R. A. Berk (1986). The best method was found to be a highly formalized judgmental, empirical Angoff…

Students from six countries--Australia, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United States--recalled the extent to which their best or worst professors used various forms of communication that have been associated with effective teaching. Across cultures, best professors were perceived to employ more nonverbal expressiveness, relaxed movement,…

This paper examines the distribution of national IQ in geographical space. When the heritability of IQ and its dependence on eco-social factors are considered from a global perspective, they suggest that the IQs of neighboring countries should be similar. Using previously published IQ data for 113 nations (Lynn, R., & Vanhanen, T., (2006). IQ and…

Speech act theory-based, second language pragmatics testing (SLPT) raises test-validation issues owing to a lack of correspondence with empirical conversational data. On the assumption that conversation analysis (CA) provides a more accurate account of language use, it is suggested that CA serve as a more empirically valid basis for SLPT…

This article reports on a study aimed at testing the hypothesis that, because of strategic and temporal variables, composing rate and text quantity may not be valid measures of writing fluency. A second objective was to validate the mean length of writers' translating episodes as a process-based indicator that mirrors their fluent written…

The concept of tailored testing for individuals is applied to the construction of tests for special groups and extended to apply to item content as well as item difficulty. It is suggested that evaluators may decide to construct tests on the basis of a unique combination of items drawn from an item bank to fit the need of a particular group. At…

An experimental study examined the possibility that proximity error could bias results from semantic differential questionnaires. Proximity error occurs when, due to the ordering, or polarity, of the differential scales, one answer on the semantic differential results in another answer to a subsequent question being substantially changed from what…

Two independent studies were conducted to investigate possible differences in General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) aptitude M resulting from the use of different test equipment (wooden vs. plastic apparatus.) As part of a ten-year longitudinal study of Vocational Development being conducted in the Department of Vocational Education at The…

One formulation of confidence scoring requires the examinee to indicate as a number his personal probability of the correctness of each alternative in a multiple-choice test. For this formulation a linear transformation of the logarithm of the correct response is maximized if the examinee accurately reports his personal probability. To equate…

Recent developments of person-fit analysis in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) are discussed. Methods from statistical process control are presented that have been proposed to classify an item score pattern as fitting or misfitting the underlying item response theory (IRT) model in a CAT. Most person-fit research in CAT is restricted to…

A computerized adaptive test (CAT) administration usually requires a large supply of items with accurately estimated psychometric properties, such as item response theory (IRT) parameter estimates, to ensure the precision of examinee ability estimation. However, an estimated IRT model of a given item in any given pool does not always correctly…

A method is presented for incorporating a large number of constraints on adaptive item selection in the construction of computerized adaptive tests. The method, which emulates practices of expert test specialists, is illustrated for verbal and quantitative measures. Its foundation is application of a weighted deviations model and algorithm. (SLD)

A longstanding belief has been that a distribution can be assumed symmetric if the mean and median are coincidental. Coincidence of mean and median is a necessary but not sufficient condition for symmetry. Two counter examples proving this point are provided. Plotting of the data and third moment computation are recommended alternatives.…

Our purpose is to offer children tasks so they can make drawings as diverse and different from each other whilst trying to avoid imitation. Achieving this goal involves the increase of children's creativity. The paper is theoretically based on the consideration of creativity as the ability to create "something new, original, and in accordance…