The general purpose of this study was to determine the effects of similarities between stems and keyed choices on test difficulty. Unlike previous investigations of this undesirable characteristic of some multiple-choice items, the present study employed items that were unintentionally faulty and samples of examinees who were highly experienced…

Proposed is the assessment of learning potential through a test-train-retest paradigm in addition to the traditional intelligence test with mentally handicapped or disadvantaged children. Discussed is a rationale for the approach which posits that poor and/or nonwhite children do not have equal access to school-preparatory experiences though they…

Item responses of two samples each of 622 normal and 573 educable mentally retarded children, 6 to 15 years of age, on Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices were submitted to a principal components analysis and varimax rotation. The following four factors were obtained: continuity and reconstruction of simple and complex structures, discrete…

The culture loaded Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the culture reduced Raven's Progressive Matrices (Colored and Standard forms) were examined and compared for large samples of white, black, and Chicano school children, K-8, in three California school districts. On both the PPVT and the Raven's the three ethnic groups show large mean…

This concise guide to objective testing, prepared by the Centre for Studies in Science Education at the University of Leeds, is intended as a manual for those science teachers who wish to understand the scope and limitations of objective questions and to construct satisfactory test items for their own use. The first section discusses the nature of…

A learning-for-mastery approach, recommended by Bloom and based on key points suggested by Biehler, was used in large lecture sections of undergraduate educational psychology. Quizzes were composed of completion items; one or more alternate forms could be taken until mastery was achieved or grades raised. Students also did short papers on readings…

The battery of the Illinois Statewide High School Testing Program is designed to provide measures fundamental to testing at the junior level. Tests will yield nine scores: verbal reasoning, grammar, usage, English total, natural science, social studies, problem solving, mathematical reasoning, and mathematics total. Testing will be administered in…

This resource unit gives administrators at the elementary and secondary levels practical help in the area of assessment, evaluation and accountability. The first section deals with basic sources of information on models and conceptualizations of full program evaluations. The second section cites magazine articles and special monographs, which are…

A curriculum was devised by working backward from Stanford-Binet items to specification of a universe of content for which the Stanford-Binet could serve as a content-valid achievement test. It was reasoned that this curriculum should home. This curriculum was tested on 20 4-year-old disadvantaged children in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The…

The personnel decision principally treated in this paper is that of remedial placement. The decision made with respect to candidates is to accept or reject, and performances by candidates are evaluated as pass or fail. A criterion and a selection variable were assumed, and the problem is to choose a cutting score on the selection variable such…

This study tests the appropriateness of Torrance's assumptions of trait independence and the combinability of measures (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) with respect to the scoring of the tests for a younger population and estimates the homogeneity of the scores. The sample consisted of 128 elementary school children. Results indicate that…

Since the passage of the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 (MDTA), the Department of Labor has funded over $30 million worth of experimental and demonstration (E and D) projects in an effort to discover some new directions for dealing with the unemployment problems of disadvantaged youth. To evaluate the effectiveness of these and…

Jackson and Messick present the beginning of a broad theory of creativity which includes four sets of properties by which outcomes of creative processes can be judged. The properties are unusualness, appropriateness, ability to transform the constraints of reality, and ability to condense meaning. Current tests for creativity generally emphasize…

The current emphasis on objectives and test item banks for constructing more effective tests is being augmented by increasingly sophisticated computer software. Items can be catalogued in numerous ways for retrieval. The items as well as instructional objectives can be stored and test forms can be selected and printed by the computer. It is also…

The purpose of this study was to determine if (1) kindergarten reading readiness can be enhanced by differentiated instruction in visuo-motor (V-M) skills, (2) the Gesell Developmental Placement Examination is effective for inter-class grouping, and (3) developmental growth can be accelerated with differentiated instruction in V-M skills.…