Since 1977, South Carolina law has required every school to develop annual and long-range (3-year) plans based on a needs assessment. Based on a 1984 law, the State Board of Education adopted the following effective schools indicators as bases of assessments: (1) instructional leadership of the principal; (2) emphasis on academics, including basic…

What works and does not work in school systems, colleges, and businesses is discussed with a focus on curriculum in the schools and other organizations. Organizational studies were completed in several school systems nationwide. Ten chapters look at the following: (1) curriculum management (the case of the academy, what curriculum is, the nature…

This package consists of an information booklet for job candidates preparing to take California's Corrections Officer Examination and a user's manual intended for those who will administer the examination. The candidate information booklet provides background information about the development of the Corrections Officer Examination, describes its…

This paper reports on the investigation of the operation of the Teacher of the Year Award program in 28 states. It focuses on the method of selection for recipients of this award, and explores the nature of the judging process used in selecting candidates at both the state and national levels. Specific objectives are: (1) to determine the criteria…

This report presents an analysis of the content validity of a series of secondary school mathematics tests designed by university mathematicians in California to help improve the articulation between secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction. The purpose in conducting this analysis was to improve understanding of what it means to…

This paper begins with an overview of several instruments for assessing the school environment, focusing on Moos's Work Environment Scale (WES). Although the WES was designed for use in any work milieu, its 10 dimensions of work environment (involvement, peer cohesion, staff support, autonomy, task orientation, work pressure, clarity, control,…

The effectiveness of a social skills training workshop was assessed by comparing the rated competence of participants in an Interpersonal Skills Training Program to the rated competence of nonparticipants. Subjects' self-ratings were included. This comparison was operationalized through a pretest-posttest design with 12 experimental and 22 control…

The Communication Competency Assessment Instrument (CCAI) was developed as a college-level communication competence measure. However, because the listening portion of the CCAI requires individual testing and is not practical for large-scale testing situations, an additional multiple choice measure was developed. In a study conducted at Kent State…

Attitude measurement through Likert-type surveys usually provides no opportunity to assess the importance of the statements of the subjects. This study, involving 479 graduate and undergraduate students, examines the question of whether importance and agreement measures have different underlying dimensions, and examines the question of whether the…

The use of factor analysis in examining the dimensionality of language tests is questioned and found to be problematic because it has a number of weak points which make it possible to manipulate results. Some of these weaknesses occur in the examinee selection sample, test selection, and the methods of extraction and rotation chosen. The use of…

This document is a training module designed to familiarize practicing school psychologists and school psychology students with the field of criterion-referenced measurement and recent developments within the field. The introduction gives reasons for the need for criterion-referenced testing as opposed to norm-referenced tests which include legal…

The primary purpose of this study was to devise a valid and reliable scale to assess the teaching concerns of early childhood students at various levels in their teacher training experiences. A total of 167 concerns, generated by 104 teacher trainees, their trainers, and an extensive review of the literature, were classified according to Katz's…

Specific recommendations are made concerning the circumstances under which the benefits of out-of-level testing outweigh the problems associated with it. Topics explored are: various methods for deciding when a set of test scores is invalid and the utility of these methods for local evaluators, the accuracy of vertical scaling, and the usefulness…

An empirical comparison of the validity of three Likert-type attitude scales measuring fourth to sixth grade students' attitudes toward school integration was conducted. The content-parallel forms differed only in terms of item phrasing and were composed of either all positive, all negative or a mix of items. Different factor solutions underlying…

The translation and adaptation for a Spanish speaking college population of the Academic Self-Concept Scale (ASCS) developed by Reynolds et al. (1980) was studied to report the initial validation results. A total of 485 students in five different colleges in Puerto Rico responded to items in this scale. In addition, information on the academic…