The original normative base for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was established in the late 1930's and early 1940's. While there was a refining of this original sample in 1957, no contemporary standards for normal people have been published. To develop new norms a random sample of 1,919 households in and near Rochester,…

Suggests ways of bringing "sanity" to standardized testing. For instance, no standardized test should ever be administered for purposes of establishing scholastic pecking orders, and the agency that administers a standardized test must determine the relationship between measured ability and measured achievement. (Author/IRT)

As part of the development of a battery of tests to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, a test, consisting of 20 items involving verbal and pictorial cues, was developed and administered to 27 third graders and 32 sixth graders. Results were analyzed to determine test reliability and correlation with other test scores.…

Testing and assessment have become extremely important components of the educational program. The purpose of this position paper is to provide factual and policy-related information that may be of use to school boards as they design or improve their districts' testing and assessment policies. It is the New York State policy that school boards…

When the Educational Testing Service became the administrator of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1983, it introduced scales based on item response theory (IRT) as a way of presenting results of the assessment to the general public. Some properties of the scales and their uses are discussed. Initial attempts at presenting…

This report contains two papers that resulted from the Multilevel Evaluation Systems (MES) Project. The first paper is "Political and Practical Issues in Improving School Boards' Use of Evaluation Data" by Joan Herman. The second paper is "Principals: Their Use of Formal and Informal Data" by Shari Golan and Jeanne Dreyfus. The…

The original norms for the 40-item Stress Response Scale (SRS) were established on children aged 5-14 years and are reported by age and gender. While the norm group age range is appropriate for the clinical screening intent of the instrument, it is restrictive for studies that might examine the effects of stress on secondary school children or as…

This report analyzes possible causes of current trends in educational achievement and discusses implications for policy. It uses data described in the publication "Trends in Educational Achievement," a Congressional Budget Office study released in April 1986, which assessed data about trends in test scores. This report begins with a…

A study examined whether intercollegiate debating enhances the critical thinking ability of participants and investigated whether users of the two existing styles--National Debate Tournament (NDT) and Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA)--differed significantly from each other and from nondebaters in their critical thinking skills. Four…

Uses of the variety of scores generated by standardized achievement tests are discussed. Desirable characteristics of scales, raw score scales, percent of correct items, percentile ranks, grade equivalents, normal curve equivalents, and scale scores are considered. The various meanings and purposes of each type of score are discussed. It is…

Rating scales are a typical method for evaluating a student's performance in outcomes assessment. The analysis of the quality of information from rating scales poses special measurement problems when researchers work with faculty in their development. Generalizability measurement theory offers a set of techniques for estimating errors or…

A confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the respective viability of factor structure models for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) standardization data. The traditional verbal-performance split was compared to an alternative model proposed by Gutkin, Reynolds and Galvin. The confirmatory analysis indicated that the…

An explicit model identifying 10 relevant components of achievement gain scores has been developed. Based on that model, all students under consideration are stratified according to individual observed pretest score, and achievement gains are measured relative to the average and range of gains among students in the same prescore stratum. The…

Several special cases of the general Rasch model, varying in complexity, were investigated to determine whether they could successfully model realistic multidimensional item response data. Whether the parameters of the model could be readily interpreted was also investigated. The models investigated included: (1) the vector model; (2) the product…