The approach used to teach English in Japanese high schools is evaluated from the perspective of the skills needed for the university entrance examinations. The tests are examined for item type and for the skills and learning processes needed to answer them. An extensive graded reading program is most appropriate to prepare students for these…

The oral interaction examination used by Britain's Royal Society of Arts for testing communicative use of English as a foreign language is described. The underlying principles of the test, its structure, administration, issues of reliability and validity, and scoring are outlined. Three components of the test itself are included. One component is…

This handbook resulted from a project to develop a tape-based alternative test of language proficiency in less commonly taught languages. The objective was to produce a test that is modeled on and readily interpretable by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Interagency Language Roundtable (ACTFL/ILR) proficiency guidelines…

This study compared student performance on language-usage test items presented in two different formats: as discrete sentences and as items embedded in passages. American College Testing (ACT) Program's Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 40 items in the two different formats. Results suggest item presentation may not…

Pronunciation is regarded as a valuable subskill in foreign language teaching and testing. Its quality is commonly assessed in a global way by having examinees read aloud. An atomistic test is a more systematic and explicit approach. Such a test would consist of about 40 items, use recorded performances, and draw on an inventory of pronunciation…

This publication offers guidelines, practical suggestions, and examples for developing better teacher-made tests. It is divided into five chapters: (1) Planning Classroom Tests, (2) Guidelines for Developing Classroom Tests, (3) Assembling and Administering Classroom Tests, (4) Assessing Test Items, and (5) Desirable Characteristics of Tests.…

A review of the basic information on intelligence testing as a schooling practice is presented, including a discussion of what intelligence is and three psychological approaches to studying intelligence (psychometric, behavioristic, and developmental). All intelligence tests derived from the psychometric approach are standardized and…

The Social Integration Scale (SIS) is intended to facilitate empirical research on the applicability of control theory to many types of adult crime, including "street crime," white collar crime, and physical assaults on spouses. There are five subscales: (1) belief (belief in law and social control); (2) commitment (psychological…

Two self-administered, self-scored, and self-interpreted career interest inventories used by adolescents and adults are described, the Self-Directed Search and its Form Easy, an adaptation for poor readers. The paper discusses test components, subtests, and theory; gender issues; interpretation; appropriateness; coding discrepancies; and…

This article describes the Comprehensive Test of Nonverbal Intelligence, an assessment designed to evaluate the intellectual ability of students ages 6 to 18.11 years for whom other mental ability tests are inappropriate or to enable comparisons between verbal and nonverbal intellectual ability. Its administration, standardization, reliability,…

The usefulness of three item response theory-based methods and the Mantel Haenszel technique in evaluating the measurement equivalence of translated assessment instruments was demonstrated in a study involving 2,000 French-speaking Canadian adults who took a French test translation and 2,000 English-speaking adults who took the English original.…

The design, administration, revision, and validation of the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute proficiency examinations are reported. The examinations were created as parallel language proficiency tests in each of five languages: Indonesian, Khmer, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Four tests were developed in each language: multiple-choice…

This paper summarizes an investigation of applications and issues in free response (FR) testing during 1989. It draws on ideas from the results of the National Educational Longitudinal Study 1988 (NELS:88) field test, a seminar series at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), working papers prepared for several FR testing applications, and…

The traditional multiple-choice reading comprehension test of English as a second language, used in the Dutch school-leaving examinations, has been criticized for its apparent lack of construct validity. The Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement has conducted a number of studies to determine whether there is a different skill…

Examination boards are often criticized for their failure to provide evidence of comparability across forms, and few such studies are publicly available. This study aims to investigate the extent to which three forms of the General English Proficiency Test Intermediate Speaking Test (GEPTS-I) are parallel in terms of two types of validity…