This volume presents a systematic review and evaluation of the major empirical measures of social psychological attitudes. It is hoped that the form of presentation adopted in this work (which includes actual scale items and scoring instructions) will help the reader to make his or her own judgments about the current state of the art in social…

The document is comprised of the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO) Toolkit, a field-tested observation packet to examine literacy and language practices and materials in prekindergarten through third grade classrooms, and a user's guide providing technical information and instructions for administration and scoring the…

The 19 chapters of this text on assessment in special education are divided into two parts. Part 1 discusses basic concepts in assessment in special education. Part 2 addresses the special education process by describing steps in the assessment continuum. Individual chapters examine the following topics: (1) an introduction to assessment; (2)…

Four studies established the reliability and validity of measures for assessing attitudes toward others and sex typing of self in occupations, activities, and traits. A fifth study provided longitudinal data from children tested 4 times from age 11 to 13 years. Data supported conceptual distinctions among individual's gender attitudes toward…

Compares the performance on the economics Advanced Placement (AP) examination between college students who had completed an introductory course in economics and high school students taking the AP examination for the first time. Discusses possible reasons that the high school students did better than their college counterparts. (MJP)

Describes the development of an instrument designed to assess the language competence of second language learners by observing natural interactions in transitional bilingual classrooms. A pilot study that assessed the social language of 24 bilingual fifth-graders in a summer math program provided data for examining the instrument's reliability and…

Describes a study of medical students that was conducted to evaluate measures of performance on factual searches of INQUIRER, a full-text database in microbiology. Measures relating to recall, precision, search term overlap, and efficiency are discussed; reliability and construct validity are considered; and implications for future research are…

This article describes the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised-Normative Update, an individually administered school achievement measure for students from kindergarten through grade twelve. The test assesses students' knowledge of general information, reading recognition, reading comprehension, mathematics, spelling, and written…

The purpose of this experimental study was to compare the effects of using static visuals versus computer-generated animation to enhance learners' comprehension and retention of a content-based lesson in a computer-based learning environment for learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Fifty-eight students from two EFL reading sections were…

Responses to Life Satisfaction Scale for Problem Youth (LSSPY) items were examined in a sample of 193 substance abusing and conduct disordered adolescents. In responding to the LSSPY, youth endorse their percentage of happiness (0 to 100%) in twelve domains (i.e., friendships, family, school, employment/work, fun activities, appearance, sex…

This study investigated the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' (NBPTS) assessment process in order to identify, quantify, and substantiate learning outcomes from the participants. One hundred and twenty candidates for the Adolescent and Young Adult Science (AYA Science) Certificate were studied over a two-year period using the…

In an effort to standardize academic application procedures, the Standardized Letter of Recommendation (SLR) was developed to capture important cognitive and noncognitive qualities of graduate school candidates. The SLR consists of seven scales ("knowledge," "analytical skills," "communication skills,"…

This study investigated construct validity and factorial invariance of a performance assessment of reading comprehension and writing proficiency through a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) structure using confirmatory factor analysis. The performance assessment was administered to 1,023 fifth and sixth graders. Interrater reliability was examined for…

Since educational statistics, which are relatively easy to obtain, can only attempt to measure "quality," this paper asks how quality in higher education is assessed and how educational rankings, which are defined as benchmarks or attempts to measure, contribute to this process. The paper notes that while attempts to rank institutions of…

The goal theory of achievement argues that the goals stressed by schools have dramatic consequences for whether children develop a sense of self-efficacy, or whether they avoid challenging tasks, giving up when faced with failure. It is commonly believed that the goals stressed by Western-oriented schools are inappropriate to indigenous minority…