The selection, administration and results of a statewide school readiness test in South Carolina are described in this report. As one component of South Carolina's Basic Skills Assessment Program, the "Cognitive Skills Assessment Battery" (CSAB) was chosen to distinguish those children who are ready for the formal first grade curriculum…

MEASUREMENT OF INDIVIDUAL TRAITS AND SEPARATE FACTORS OF INTELLIGENCE FOLLOWED BY EMPIRICAL COMBINATION OF THESE MEASURES INTO APTITUDE TEST BATTERIES SHOULD BE THE BASIS OF SELECTION OF STUDENTS FOR VOCATIONAL TRAINING. DURING THE PAST 14 YEARS, TRADE-TECHNICAL COLLEGE HAS DEVELOPED AND VALIDATED SUCH TEST BATTERIES FOR SOME 55 TRADE AND…

This document reports on a planning conference of the International Mathematics Committee, responsible for the second study of school mathematics to be conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The study will address issues of interest to mathematics educators, with emphasis on the areas of…

A large amount of professional interest has been focused upon the ambiguities and problems involved in the conduct of professional licensing and certification through examinations. What seems to be a simple problem on the surface, that being the policing of professionals for competence and the practice of conducting this policing so that it offers…

Two independent studies were conducted to investigate possible differences in General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) aptitude M resulting from the use of different test equipment (wooden vs. plastic apparatus.) As part of a ten-year longitudinal study of Vocational Development being conducted in the Department of Vocational Education at The…

One formulation of confidence scoring requires the examinee to indicate as a number his personal probability of the correctness of each alternative in a multiple-choice test. For this formulation a linear transformation of the logarithm of the correct response is maximized if the examinee accurately reports his personal probability. To equate…

Summarized are the proceedings of the conference (discussions, agenda, invitees), held to examine the present state of the testing and evaluation of blind and visually impaired persons. Not only tests and methods were covered, but also how evaluation procedures fit into educational and rehabilitation procedures, ethical considerations, and…

This study explored the utility, from a psychometric and cost effectiveness standpoint, of a computerized adaptive measurement system in an Air Force technical training environment. The phase 1 effort was designed to take the study to the point of producing an operational system ready to actually test technical training students adaptively. A…

Decision-theoretic testing is used to explore whether students can improve their realism, i.e. congruence between reported and true probabilities. Randomized sets of math problems were presented at computer terminals to 49 seventh graders from two classes (high/low achievers) over a period of three weeks. The subject assigned values to each of…

External testing (public tests) is examined from a British point of view by George Cameron Allen and then responded to by an American. Allen discusses the history of external examinations in Britain, paying particular attention to the General Certificate of Education (GCE) examinations and the dichotomy that exists between language and literature…

This study was designed to determine the effects of test anxiety level and defensiveness (lie scale) level on reading comprehension of fourth grade boys as measured by the cloze procedure. The subjects, 253 male fourth graders, were administered Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale for Children and the lie scale of the General Anxiety Scale for Children.…

The study was designed to answer two questions: (1) What cognitive skills are emphasized by written test items constructed by eighth grade science teachers in the public schools of Louisiana? and (2) Are there differences of emphasis on the cognitive skills when comparisons are made among test questions from those teachers based on the following…

This paper presents guidelines for valid and effective test preparation and presentation. Working on the assumption that teacher secrecy about tests and the subsequent student test-fear are pointless and harmful, this paper outlines some tools for test preparation, such as pretests, teacher file cards as to items covered in class and clearly…

Before a business adopts tests in personnel selection, it should be decided that the increased cost and bother are likely to be offset by the savings that come from this additional selection procedure. Fairly accurate estimates of the cost of testing can be made, but in educational testing it is harder than in businesses to measure the results in…

The administration of the National Test-Equating Study in Reading is described as part of a symposium on the study. After contacts with each of the State Departments of Education, district and LEA superintendents were asked to consider the participation of randomly selected schools within their jurisdictions. Upon receipt of approval, school…