This article proposes that sampling design effects have potentially huge unrecognized impacts on the results reported by large-scale district and state assessments in the United States. When design effects are unrecognized and unaccounted for they lead to underestimating the sampling error in item and test statistics. Underestimating the sampling…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

This article discusses practical and theoretical problems related to the measurement of formal operations. The first section of the article discusses problems in measuring formal operations using the clinical interview method. These problems include the lack of both a standardized interview and a uniform scoring procedure. Section two discusses…

Freshmen (N=202) took two batteries of aptitude tests 10 months apart. Six pairs of tests were studied. Two pairs were identical, two were parallel, and two were completely different. This design made it possible to separate three components of practice: (a) general test sophistication, (b) specific practice effect, and (c) item familiarization.…

Retired vice-president of Educational Testing Service asserts that chances for tests being misused are greater than ever. Speech delivered at ETS's Invitational Conference on Testing Problems on October 28, 1972, in New York, New York. (DS)

The purpose of this study was to further examine the reliability of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), a new instrument to measure hearing vocabulary so that a student's verbal intelligence may be inferred. A group testing procedure was utilized by reproducing the PPVT plates on 35 millimeter transparent slides and projecting them onto a…

Investigates differences in marking standard and reliability when experienced teachers carried out assessments of the performance on practical exercises. The results showed that there was no difference between the assessments from the groups containing 5 and 20 students. (Author/YP)

The research from a four-year project of implied orders tailored testing is summarized. The method of implied orders testing combines the principles of ordinal measurement with the concept of the Guttman scale as an ideal. The basic principle for dichotomous items is that either an item is missed and "dominates" a person or it is answered…

The stability and change of verbal, non-verbal, and total IQ scores from group tests were investigated for students tested at Grades 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, and 11. Conclusions are discussed in detail, and the following recommendations are made: (1) Group intelligence tests should not be routinely administered in Grades 1 and 2 unless the users and…

Black students from two cities and Mexican-American students, both male and female, showed small but consistent tendencies to perform better, relative to White groups, on three nontraditional measures: tests of inductive reasoning, spatial scanning, and associative memory. These measures showed somewhat less discrepancy between the groups than did…

When selecting standardized reading tests for purposes of decision making, the school psychologist must answer several questions, such as "What reading skills do I wish to assess?" or "How do I judge if the test is technically adequate?" Recommendations for test selection are made within the context of these questions.…

It is asserted in this paper that some standardized tests do not do a good job of what they claim to do, and for some testing purposes nonstandardized tests are more appropriate or efficient. Under present circumstances, group I.Q. tests should be abolished. They provide no useful information that cannot be gained from achievement tests. And what…

Adult educators in the state of New Jersey have expressed concern about the adequacy of the 1978 General Educational Development (GED) test. Based on these concerns research was conducted in the use and applicability of the current GED test. The project investigated whether the existing GED test was meeting the needs of the large majority of GED…