This brief report summarizes the legal requirements of nondiscrimination imposed by the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Americans with Disabilities Act as of July 26, 1992, especially in the area of testing. The report emphasizes that literacy tests must be nondiscriminatory and related to the job for which they are given. The following…

The question of reliability in the intellectual assessment of young children is cause for concern among developmental psychologists and diagnosticians. The issue of reliability is confounded by normal variability in skills during early childhood, by the problem of consistency across time of age-appropriate assessment measures, and by the selection…

The usefulness of response latency data for biographical inventory items was assessed for improving the inventory's validity. Focus was on assessing whether weighting item scores on the basis of their latencies improves the predictive validity of the inventory's total score. A total of 120 items from the Armed Services Applicant Profile (ASAP)…

The authors investigated whether the constructs measured by the Kindergarten Screening Inventory (KSI) were the same for males and females and for Anglo American, Negro American and Mexican American ethnic groups. Results indicate they are very similar. (Author)

Surveys the needs for effective teachers and discusses how tests meet those needs, arguing that differences in test achievement attained by minority applicants need not be attributed to genetic differences, nor should differences in test achievement necessarily be attributed to bias in the tests. (JM)

Note that judgments about the relationship of test items to actual job duties have generally been made as a single comparison, proposes a model for analyzing the accuracy of translations for each step of the process of test development for use in personnel administration, and suggests scaling procedures appropriate for the various judgments. (JM)

The purpose of this paper is to describe a set of procedures, that, when carried out, permit the conclusion that a test is a fair measure from the standpoint of specific sub-groups within a test population. A fair test is defined as a test for which a set of data-collection procedures have been carried out and the results reported. (Author/JM)

This report summarizes findings on 26 National Teacher Examination specialty area tests provided by faculty reviewers from five Oregon institutions of higher education. Reviewers were asked to judge tests on the basis of: (1) whether students at the reviewer's institution would have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge measured in test items;…

This study investigates the validity of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (S-B:4) for use with students with learning disabilities. It compares the performance of 18 elementary-age students on the S-B:4 and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). The subjects were identified by their school as having learning…

This report is a summary of the Basic Skills Task Force activities covering the period from August 1982 to June 30, 1983. The Task Force was created by the West Virginia Board of Education in 1982. The report provides information on the historical background of the Task Force, a summary of how it functioned, and recommendations of the Task Force…

The purpose of this resarch was to develop a model of verbal information processing for use in subsequent analyses of the construct and predictive validity of the current Department of Defense military selection and classification battery, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) 8/9/10. The theory and research methods of selected…

Research on the lack of correlation between standardized tests and school district goals has suggested that district goals might be better met by supplementing standardized tests with district-made criterion-referenced testing systems. This article reports on the development of such a system, the Academic Learning Progress Assessment System…

This paper, as an illustration of the procedures involved in a cooperative effort, describes a project in which the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) designed and developed a minimum standards test in collaboration with a large urban school district in California. The activity described focuses on the writing sample included in the test. The…

The Georgia Teacher Certification Testing Program includes 28 criterion-referenced tests designed by National Evaluation Systems, Inc. (Amherst, Massachusetts) and covering 28 different teaching, leadership, and service fields. This publication offers an overview of the test development process, test validation procedures, test administration…

The problems of validity and fairness involved in multiple-choice critical thinking tests can be lessened by using verbal reports of examinees' thinking during the process of developing such tests in order to retain only those items which rely on critical thinking skills to obtain the correct answer. Multiple-choice testing can lead to unfair…