The history and institutional use of cutoff scores is reviewed, emphasizing the changes in these scores used over the years and the rationale used in selecting cutoff scores. A brief description of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) is provided, as is background about how it works. Cutoff score recommendations of the American Council on…

The heavy concentration of time and funds to measure writing performance is the major reason other areas deserving scrutiny are so often neglected by evaluators. Three failings typical of the field of writing assessment as it is conducted for the purpose of program evaluation are: (1) a failure to view writing as a multiple construct; (2) a…

The goal of this booklet is to describe some of the special challenges posed by early childhood assessment in general, and particularly as they apply to Title I program evaluation. The booklet has four purposes: (1) to describe special issues in early childhood assessment; (2) to describe briefly alternative approaches to early childhood…

Guidelines are proposed for reviewing career interest tests, aptitude tests, and achievement tests for sex bias in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments 1972. To review the tests, several recommendations are made: analyze the test; review the technical manuals and interpretive information; examine and classify test items, reading…

IN ORDER TO TEST THE EFFICACY OF METHODS USED BY VARIOUS RESEARCHERS FOR GENERATING SPONTANEOUS SPEECH FROM UNDERPRIVILEGED CHILDREN, 20 THREE- TO FOUR-YEAR-OLD GIRLS WERE SELECTED AT RANDOM FROM A HEADSTART-TYPE PROGRAM AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY FOR TESTING. ALL WERE NEGROES AND FROM A TARGET AREA FOR POVERTY PROGRAMS. THE CHILDREN WERE TESTED…

Three areas of concern related to test bias and validity should be considered during the revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests. The first area concerns the sources and consequences of test bias. Five sources of bias have been identified: numerical bias, role bias, status bias, stereotypic bias, and familiarity bias. The…

Specifying and writing appropriate items for student writing assessments is an exacting task. All too frequently, however, teachers approach this task by reading a skill statement and hurriedly writing a few items with correct answers combined with several distractors. This approach disregards the essentials of isolating a single skill for…

After some initial comments on Robert Calfee's discussion of ways in which theory and research in reading assessment can help decision makers, the author makes two points: (1) we need to provide a much better education for reading teachers than is currently being provided, and this will require radically larger amounts of time than are currently…

In developing tests for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) survey, methodological problems arose in three areas: curriculum, communication, and culture. Efforts to identify the core of common objectives and the penumbra of distinctive, sometimes partly shared but sometimes unique, goals operated…

This paper is a review of the methodological problems recently uncovered in studying the nature of teacher effectiveness and evaluating the performance of individual teachers. Four problems encountered in the literature are range of measurements, inconsistent instrumentation across similar studies, lack of a generic framework from which to select…

This experiment compares the effects of group reactive inhibition therapy and group reciprocal inhibition therapy with no treatment on the anxiety level of test-anxious college students. Twenty undergraduate students volunteered for the study and were assigned to either the reactive inhibition group, the reciprocal inhibition group, or the…

This study examined the effects of three variables on self-scoring accuracy and satisfaction with results on Holland's Self Directed Search. The sample consisted of 489 freshmen who took the SDS during orientation. The three independent variables were the test administrator's attitude toward the SDS (positive or neutral), the size of the group…

The current interest in an educational technology that stresses adaptation to individual student differences has resulted in such individualized systems as Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) and Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). However, such systems are not the answer to an avoidance of standardization of students. No one has yet…

Three major points covered by this report are (1) What are the demands for reading assessment and how have the demands increased?; (2) How adequately do present standardized reading tests meet these demands?; and (3) What possible approaches exist for developing assessment procedures which meet these demands? An extreme interest in finding out how…

This paper describes an ongoing treatment program based on a cognitive-attentional interpretation of text anxiety. The primary goal is to train students to eliminate self-relevant thinking, and increase task-relevant thinking, i.e., to turn their attention from the self to the demands of the external situation. Three studies are described. The…