Study skills books sometimes give conflicting advice concerning whether or not students should change their initial responses to multiple-choice questions about which they are unsure. In contrast, answer-changing research consistently shows that the majority of answer changes are from wrong to right. Responses of 244 community college students to…

A discussion of testing in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction focuses on the gap between ESL students' test performance on the one hand and their own and teachers' assessments of their competence on the other. First, a number of issues, drawn from the literature, are examined briefly, including the appropriateness of current testing…

To assess the written and verbal communication skills of the approximately 100 deaf and hard-of-hearing students attending the College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a real challenge. The only way for most of these students to satisfy the College of Business' general writing competency requirement was to take the…

The importance of dynamic testing procedures for understanding reasoning and its underlying cognitive processes as well as for increasing validity is investigated. An experiment tested the premise that African American and White college students demonstrate equivalent inductive reasoning ability when tested under induced mediation procedures,…

Various formal and informal literacy assessment measures are described and evaluated in this report. Specifically, the extent to which such measures reflect or distort the literacy performance of students from diverse linguistic, cultural, or economic background is noted. Although the report supports a flexible approach to assessment--giving…

Brief explanations are presented of some of the different methods used to score multiple-choice tests; and some studies of partial information, guessing strategies, and test-taking behaviors are reviewed. Studies are grouped in three categories of effort to improve scoring: (1) those that require extra effort from the examinee to answer…

This court litigation reverses Farris and Black of Home School Legal Defense Association v. South Carolina State Board of Education, which found that the Education Entrance Examination (EEE) was properly validated for use in testing home school instructors as regulated by S. C. Code Ann. Section 59-65-40(A)(1)(a)(1990), the home schooling statute…

Problems in accountability assessment are examined from a unique perspective by considering the prices paid as a result of the use of secret tests (tests comprised of items drawn from non-publicly available item banks). This report is a compilation of the following articles: (1) "The Social, Intellectual, and Psychological Prices of…

The predictive and incremental validity of the New Medical College Admission Test (New MCAT) Science Problems Subtest was examined with a sample of over 165 medical students. Criterion measures were National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) Part I (basic science) and Part II (clinical science) performance. The Science Problems subscore is derived…

The passage comprehensibility of three diagnostic reading tests--the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales, and the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty--was evaluated using the following text variables: content familiarity, vocabulary, the number of idea units in the text, the number of text-based inferences…

This paper is prompted by the Joint Statement issued from the Education Summit, and addresses the need to change testing policy from reliance on standardized, multiple-choice testing to the use of more authentic methods of assessing educational performance and progress. The governors are warned against increasing the use of standardized tests and…

The work of the ethicist Charles Curran and the problem-solving strategy of the mixed consequentialist ethical model are applied to a traditional social science measurement problem--that of how to adjust a recommended standard in order to be fair to the test-taker and society. The focus is on criterion-referenced teacher certification tests.…

This paper reports the development of a test battery to replace the structural testing used in Kuwait to assess skills acquired in the communicatively-based Crescent English Course. A list of activities and tasks required of students at level six was drawn from the course syllabus, and four modules containing clusters of integrated language tasks…

Because the science of nursing is still at an early stage of development, nurses involved in clinical research often find that no appropriate measures are available to sample the theoretical construct of interest. Researchers often must design and test new instruments before proceeding to test theory. A study of the effect of nurse-client…

Reviews of 20 career guidance measures are reprinted from the Association for Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development's "Newsnotes." Each entry includes author, title, publisher, purpose, format, scoring, norms, cost, review, concerns, and additional reviews. These tests cover the areas of occupational interests, career awareness,…