"Pickleball" is a new racquet sport which is one of the fastest growing educational activities in the Northwest. This paper describes the development of a test battery designed to measure students' pickleball skills for purposes of classification; to determine improvement of playing skills; and to aid in grading of individual…

A "Fundamentals of Speech Communication" course is required of all college students, and upon completion of such a course students should possess those basic speaking and listening skills necessary to complete successfully their college educations. With a view toward developing a new, more effective listening test, a study examined…

The development and validation of a scale to assess English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' perceived self-efficacy are described. Self-efficacy expectations are beliefs about one's ability to perform a given task successfully. Research on self-efficacy and related concepts is reviewed, noting their significant role in predictor human…

Despite its supposed importance, children's emergent interest in literacy has been seldom studied. As a result, no easy-to-use and psychometrically sound measure of children's emergent interest in literacy exists. This study made an initial attempt at validating such a measure. On three separate occasions, 24 parents and their 2- to 3-year-old…

The effects of two different approaches to training community nurses in patient self-care were evaluated. In an intensive workshop, 36 nurses were trained, and 19 of them received further personal guidance 11 times during a 6-month period. Their performance was assessed before the educational intervention, after the workshop, and after the…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on assessing the learning organization. "Measuring Organizational Learning: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of an Organization Survey" (Jamie Callahan Fabian, Ralph O. Mueller, Dail L. Fields) compares two models for measuring four constructs inherent to Schwandt's model of…

Three descriptive statistics (difficulty, discrimination, and reliability) of multiple-choice (MC) test items were compared to those of a new (1980s) format of machine-scored questions. The new method, answer-bank multi-digit testing (MDT), uses alphabetized lists of up to 1,000 alternatives and approximates the completion style of assessment…

This report describes a methodology for increasing the validity and reliability of inferences made about the problem-solving ability of science students that is based on performance on different kinds of tests. The generalizable cognitive components of problem solving that might be targeted by assessment are described, and specifications are…

The Student Descriptor Scale (SDS) was developed as a validation measure to determine whether students described and counted by states as "severely handicapped" were, indeed, students with severe disabilities. The SDS addresses nine characteristics: intellectual disability, health impairment, need for toileting assistance, upper torso motor…

A tool was devised to measure the perceived reality of television, an important variable in understanding how television influences an individual's perception of social reality. This was accomplished by using a research plan that allowed university subjects to generate the measures used for tapping the "reality" of television content.…

An instrument for measuring telephone apprehension was developed to facilitate research into hypothesized relationships between communication apprehension and telephone apprehension. A set of 92 Likert-type items was adapted from previous communication apprehension scales and administered to 81 undergraduate students in a speech communication…

A pictorial self-concept inventory for Mexican-American children was developed and validated. A primary concern was the adequate selection of pictures that would be relevant to the child's cultural background and environment. Another concern was the development of subscales which would measure the areas of sense of control, social self, academic…

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge. The material is organized into five units: (1) introduction to measurement theory; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) item analysis in test development; and (5) test scoring and…

In the past several years, numerous educational climate instruments and questionnaires have been developed. One such instrument is the Charles F. Kettering (CFK) School Climate Profile, a popular measure of school climate that is widely used to gather data for administrative planning and curriculum revision. The instrument is patterned on the…

This study examined efficacy of different story collection procedures with normally developing (N=10) and language disordered (N=6) preschool children. Factor analyses probed such possible interfering factors as home vs. school environments, familiarity of the story requester, coaxing cues, stimulus structure, and presence of such props as dolls…