The purposes of this paper are to explore and present various opinions concerning the nature of functional literacy and the questions involved in assessing the extent to which one is or is not functionally literate, and to describe one instrument designed to measure functional literacy. The major sections of the paper provide information on the…

Because a critical issue in current assessment efforts is the widespread use of technically inadequate tests, the study examined tests chosen by 159 school professionals during a computer simulation of placement decision making about potentially handicapped students. Chi square analysis showed technically adequate devices were chosen…

When people talk about themselves, psychologists have noted that their verbal reports can be categorized as simple factual communications about the self, i.e., self-disclosure, or as ways to instruct others about how one is to be regarded, i.e., self-presentation. Responses to items on objective self-report measures of personality similarly can be…

This document is the third volume in a set of five Career Education Measurement Handbooks intended to help local education personnel in measurement and evaluation. Divided into seven major sections, this handbook is designed to provide practical guidelines for improving career education instruments developed at the local level. It is primarily…

A home assessment measure was developed as an economical alternative to parent interviews. The 48 items measured five factors: parent expectations and aspirations; family activeness; independence; language development; and support of school and education. Correlations with standardized reading and mathematics achievement tests were based on…

This manual sets forth comprehension guidelines and procedures for selecting instruments to measure educational growth, achievement, and outcomes. The necessary criteria are presented in a checklist format, permitting local district personnel to evaluate the worth of testing instruments before adoption. A subset of the criteria are defined as…

A review of the research literature considers the following questions: (1) what is the general quality of the information resulting from systematic student evaluation of faculty effectiveness?; and (2) what are the consequences of soliciting this information and making it available to those people who may utilize it in their decision making…

A test was constructed to measure a person's ability to produce Spanish sounds which are considered difficult but which must be mastered for fluency in Spanish. The test was used with learners from kindergarten to college. It was consensually validated by a panel of bilingual specialists after analyzing it according to contrastive analysis…

This study was undertaken to examine the reliability and validity of a student-designed instrument developed to provide feedback to high school teachers on student perception of teacher performance. The Student Observation of Teachers and Teaching Techniques (StOTT) questionnaire was developed by a board of eleventh- and twelfth-grade Pennsylvania…

This paper describes the development of the Test of Science Processes, an instrument for assessing achievement and diagnosing weaknesses in the use of science processes by students in grades 7, 8, and 9. The science processes considered were observing, comparing, classifying, quantifying, measuring, experimenting, inferring, and predicting. The…

The purpose of this study was to develop an interest inventory covering construction industry practices. A taxonomy developed by the Industrial Arts Curriculum Project served as a basis for item selection, and covered industrial management, production, and personnel technology. A scale for each of these was included in an inventory containing 138…

In a 1963 experiment, 3,867 boys and 3,684 girls in the second grade were used to investigate the dimensionality of the Test Anxiety Scale for Children (TASC). Factors included test anxiety, remote school concern, poor self-evaluation and somatic signs of anxiety. Factor analysis demonstrates a stable multidimensional structure for TASC. Results…

The primary objective of this study was to develop an instrument to measure student attitudes toward individualized and laboratory instruction during a specific period of instruction such as an hour, day, week, or month. Positive and negative statements relating to these attitudes were developed and screened by five professors. The resulting 50…

MeasureMetric is a school television/film series for fifth and sixth grade students which presents measurement and the metric system. The main goal of this test development effort was to produce a valid and reliable test usable by classroom teachers for measuring children's achievement of the objectives of the twelve 15-minute programs dealing…

The subscales of the How I See Myself Scale were originally established by using a principal components analysis on item scores for a sample of 4,217 elementary school children in grades three to six. A re-analysis of the same data using a common factor solution (using test communalities instead of units in the major diagonal of the correlation…