When accurately assigned and administered appropriately, testing accommodations help ameliorate the effects of personal characteristics that limit access to critical information and prevent a person from demonstrating his or her true abilities in the tested domain. Inaccurate assignment or misuse of accommodations may counteract the benefits of…

Remarks made at the conference are summarized in seven sections of this narrative report: (1) update: recent events concerning testing,--representing the viewpoints of school districts, professional associations, government agencies, and research organizations; (2) National Institute of Education (NIE) study of school districts' use of test and…

Explores factor structure of the Personality Research Form (PRF) and examines the inventory's relations with response styles. In general, the PRF content scales correlate moderately with each other and with measures of acquiescence, social desirability, and defensiveness response biases. (Author)

Two distinct approaches, one based on item response theory and the other based on observed item responses and standard summary statistics, have been proposed to identify unusual response patterns. A link between these two approaches is provided by showing certain correspondences between Sato's S-P Curve Theory and item response theory. This link…

The Los Angeles Unified School District has been concerned over the excess testing of elementary school pupils, particularly those who are in special programs. When the Board of Education decided to have yearly testing of pupil progress using a locally developed criterion-referenced test, the intention was to replace a previously used…

The Ralph Nader report on the Educational Testing Service (ETS), entitled The Reign of ETS, the Corporation That Makes Up Minds, explicitly and implicitly raises serious issues concerning the testing enterprise. Major themes include the role of testing in the educational selection system, the validity of existing tests, and the corporate power of…

This 125-item annotated bibliography gives access to much of research undertaken in the past decade concerning sex bias in testing, e.g., educational achievement tests, career interest inventories, and aptitude tests attacked as being biased against females. The items originated with a computer search of several data bases including the following:…

This paper will help the counselor and researcher in selecting the personality tests appropriate for the client or target culture, in making the best possible use of existing instruments by taking into account such devices as itinerant norms, and in focusing on the practical application of psychological knowledge. (Author)

Discusses difficulties inherent in assessment of oral abilities as part of a comprehensive examination system. (AA)

The model proposed views the assessment of human functioning as a multi-dimensional process, thus requiring that assessment use several data collection procedures. (Author/AM)

This article provides a critical review and chronology of the developments and calls for a moratorium on testing since 1968. Today the public is more aware about the misuse and dangers of testing than it was years ago thanks to the Association of Black Psychologists moratorium on testing. (Author/AM)

Addresses the problem of the equivalence of linguistically translated items that form measurement scales used to assess psychological traits or constructs in source and target cultures and languages. Outlines assessment procedures that are standardized but that also reflect cultural-specific concepts and values. (PS)

Discusses the arguments for and against minimum competency testing, noting that the same issues are used to support both positions. (FL)

In an earlier article, Hunt envisions the automation of intelligence testing, but he appears to be overly optimistic. He neglects to mention conceptual and practical difficulties at the interface of measurement and theory that place psychometry not in the dawn of microcomputerization, but rather more nearly in its primordium. (Author)