A major objective of the measurement profession continues to be the assurance of high quality tests and proper test use. The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) constitutes a group of testing practitioners, scholars, and specialists with well-informed opinions on matters of educational measurement and testing. NCME regards it as…

This document contains abstracts of papers from a workshop resulting from events stemming from the Office of Education report, A Look at Women in Education: Issues and Answers for HEW. This report charged that a particular career interest inventory was sex-biased, but no operational definition of sex bias was given, the issues involved were not…

Test presentation mode significantly affected test performance in two randomized groups of college students exposed to audio/visual and visual test modes. A significant difference was found between test presentation mode and mean test scores; the audio/visual test mode was superior to the visual test mode; and the "brighter" students seemed to…

Subjects are asked to answer six questions, partly with a frequency and partly by marking a verbally anchored scale with five categories. Some univariate and multivariate analyses are performed to elucidate the relations between variables with the two different modes of response. Although there are similarities in results for the two types of…

Four conceptually different variables in reading: (1) knowledge gained (new information), (2) amount comprehended (degree of understanding), (3) reading aptitude (differences between individuals), and (4) reading improvement (within individual changes as a result of treatment) are discussed. Existing measures of reading comprehension are evaluated…

These guidelines deal specifically with the context in which the measurement of interests occurs and the interpretive materials which are made available to test users. They are classified and discussed in three categories: guidelines intended to inform the test user of possible factors influencing a sex-biased response on interest inventories;…

The general purpose of this study was to determine the effects of similarities between stems and keyed choices on test difficulty. Unlike previous investigations of this undesirable characteristic of some multiple-choice items, the present study employed items that were unintentionally faulty and samples of examinees who were highly experienced…

Item responses of two samples each of 622 normal and 573 educable mentally retarded children, 6 to 15 years of age, on Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices were submitted to a principal components analysis and varimax rotation. The following four factors were obtained: continuity and reconstruction of simple and complex structures, discrete…

This study tests the appropriateness of Torrance's assumptions of trait independence and the combinability of measures (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) with respect to the scoring of the tests for a younger population and estimates the homogeneity of the scores. The sample consisted of 128 elementary school children. Results indicate that…

Four confusing issues that have delayed progress toward an awareness that testing is not a source of unfairness for minority students are discussed: (1) the assumptions underlying most of our psychometric manipulations are often not acknowledged or understood; (2) the extent of the objectivity of psychometrics is frequently exaggerated; (3) the…

This manual describes the construction, administration and interpretation of the Course Evaluation Schedule, designed to assess students' perception of instruction. The inventory is divided into four parts; the first, designed to elicit information about the instructional modes used, is not included in the ratings. The remaining three parts…

The examination of the use of ability grouping of students begins with presentation of the questionnaire responses from 328 school districts concerning how and how much ability grouping is practiced within their systems, on what basis students are assigned to groups, and how many poor or non-white students are involved. Following is a summary of…

This paper provides substantial evidence in favor of the continued use of conventional objective testing procedures in lieu of either the Coombs' cross-out technique or the Dressel and Schmid free-choice response procedure. From the studies presented in this paper, the tendency is for the cross-out and the free choice methods to yield a decrement…

Arguments for and against the use of an oral examination as part of the evaluation process are reviewed and found to rely on the experience of practitioners rather than on empirical research. Several alternatives to the traditional oral examination are discussed as ways to increase the validity of educational evaluations. (AA)

Different forms of a vocabulary test were administered to college students. Results indicated that as the frequency of specific determiners increased, they formed increasingly strong but differential guessing response sets in high and low scoring groups; however, the magnitude of the effect was much stronger for position specific determiners.…