The Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement, Fourth Edition (WJ IV ACH) is purported to align with Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory and offers upward of 20 scores within its interpretive and scoring system. The Technical Manual does not furnish validity evidence for the scores reported by the scoring system, suggesting that evidentiary support may…

Test anxiety has proliferated in the era of test-based accountability; however, there are limited tools that allow for consistent identification of students at risk. The present study reports on the psychometric evidence and continued development of the Multidimensional Test Anxiety Scale (MTAS). Evidence is presented to support both the…

Background/Context: Pass/fail standardized exams frequently selectively rescore failing exams and retest failing examinees. This practice distorts the test score distribution and can confuse those who do analysis on these distributions. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal showed large discontinuities in the New York City Regent test score…

As a replication in the Chinese context of previous aptitude testing validation studies, this research aims at exploring the validity of an interpreting aptitude test battery, composed of the Logical Memory Test (LMT), the Scale of Language Anxiety (SLA) and the Achievement Motivation Test (AMT), in the prediction of consecutive interpreting…

When the Differential Ability Scales--Second Edition (DAS-II) was developed, the instrument's content, structure, and theoretical orientation were amended. Despite these changes, the "Technical Handbook" did not report results from exploratory factor analytic investigations, and confirmatory factor analyses were implemented using…

High school chemistry teachers will often establish goals that guide assessment design and interpretation of assessment results. However, little is known about how these goals and the assessment design collectively guide the interpretation of results. This study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results…

The factor structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Fourth Edition, Italian adaptation (WISC-IV Itaian; Orsini, Pezzuti, & Picone, 2012; Wechsler, 2012) standardization sample was examined with exploratory factor analytic methods (EFA) not included in the "Technical Manual." Principal-axis extraction followed by…

Clinical cognitive ability assessment--and its corollary, score interpretation--are in a state of disarray. Many current instruments are designed to provide a bevy of scores to appeal to a variety of school psychologists. These scores are not all grounded in the attribute's theory or developed from sound measurement or psychometric theory. Thus,…

We are developing the Equitable Screening to Support Youth (ESSY) Whole Child Screener to address concerns prevalent in existing school-based screenings that impede goals to advance educational equity using universal screeners. Traditional assessment development does not include end users in the early development phases, instead relying on a…

Large-scale language testing uses statistical information to account for the quality of an assessment system. In this reflection article, I explain how basic statistics can be used meaningfully in the context of classroom language assessment. The paper explores a series of statistical calculations that can be used to examine test scores and…

Researchers are often inclined to test agreement or discrepancy hypotheses using difference scores. This commentary explains 2 mathematical-statistical principles underlying associations with difference scores and 2 conceptual-interpretation problems that make difference scores inappropriate for testing such hypotheses. The commentary provides…

Foreign language placement testing, an important component in university foreign language programs, has received considerable, but not copious, attention over the years in second language (L2) testing research (Norris, 2004), and it has been mostly concentrated on L2 English. In contrast to validation research on L2 English placement testing, the…

From uneven digital access and growing academic gaps to reports of students missing or disengaged since March 2020, it is evident that English Learners (ELs) have endured some of the pandemic's gravest impacts on students across the United States. But because the pandemic has affected state assessment systems as well as instruction, it is…

A fundamental premise in assessment is that the underlying construct is equivalent across different groups of students and that this structure does not vary over years. The pandemic has potentially impacted opportunity to learn and disrupted the internal structure of assessments in various ways. Past research has suggested that students tended to…

This article reports the development and validation of a test instrument to assess secondary school students' declarative quantum optics knowledge. With that, we respond to modern developments from physics education research: Numerous researchers propose quantum optics-based introductory courses in quantum physics, focusing on experiments with…