English language learners (ELLs) constitute one of the fastest growing subpopulations of students in the United States. It is important to determine whether the assessments used by states in determining students' proficiencies are valid and fair for ELLs. This study focused on several standards-based assessments in mathematics and science…

The authors developed and validated a measure of teachers' motivation toward specific work tasks: The Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers (WTMST). The WTMST is designed to assess five motivational constructs toward six work tasks (e.g., class preparation, teaching). The authors conducted a preliminary (n = 42) and a main study among…

The purpose of this study is to determine the latent structure of the California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition (CVLT-II; Delis, Kramer, Kaplan, & Ober, 2000) at three different age levels, using the standardization sample. Maximum likelihood confirmatory factor analyses are performed to test four competing hypothetical models for fit and…

This article describes the development and two studies on the construct validity of the Academic Emotions Scale (AES). The AES is a French self-report questionnaire assessing six emotions in the context of school learning: enjoyment, hope, pride, anxiety, shame and frustration. Its construct validity was studied through exploratory and…

Background: A number of disorders are associated with pragmatic difficulties. Instruments that can make subdivisions within the larger construct of pragmatics could be important tools for disentangling profiles of pragmatic difficulty in different disorders. The deficits underlying the observed pragmatic difficulties may be different for different…

This handbook is designed as a quick reference for first-year teachers who find themselves in an assessment driven environment with little experience to help make sense of the language, underlying philosophy, or organizational structure of the assessment system. The handbook begins with advice on developing and evaluating effective learning…

As part of a continuing series of research studies on stress in schools, this study examined the construct validity of peripheral temperature at the fingertips as a measure of school stress. Measurements were made in classes selected at random from 11 volunteer schools in South Carolina. Three types of correlational studies were undertaken: (1)…

Scores of 135 community college students on the Occupational Aptitude Survey and Interest Schedule (OASIS) were compared with different academic majors. A series of 18 one-way analyses of variance provided evidence for the construct validity of the OASIS Interest Schedule. (Author/GDC)

Three studies of dynamic testing of spatial aptitude were performed with training on the physical analogue of the mental task between the pre-test and the post-test. A total of 129 college students participated. Training increased spatial ability. Other experiments indicated that construct validity was influenced by dynamic testing. (SLD)

Examination of methods used by two software review services in evaluating microcomputer courseware--EPIE (Educational Products Information Exchange) and MicroSIFT (Microcomputer Software and Information for Teachers)--found low correlations between their recommendations for 82 programs. This lack of agreement casts doubts on the usefulness of…

The sporadic investigations regarding children's concepts of death have lacked standard methods or instruments for evaluating these conceptions. Whether or not research on children's concepts of death can be gauged by a standard set of questions is explored in this paper. It reports on the evaluation of a new questionnaire's (Concept of Life and…

A continuing and vexing problem associated with survey instrument development is the creation of items, initially, that correlate favorably a posteriori with constructs being measured. This study tests the use of symbolic-logic matrices developed by D. G. Coleman (1979) in creating factorially "pure" statistically discrete constructs in…

Factor analysis has historically been used for myriad purposes in the social and behavioral sciences, but an especially important application of this technique has been to evaluate construct validity. Since in the present milieu both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are readily available to the researcher,…

This study examined the comparability of scores on the National Nurses Aides Assessment Program (NNAAP) test across language and administration condition groups for calibration and validation samples that were randomly drawn from the same population. A sample of 20,568 candidate responses to 1 test form was used. This examination is given in…

One of the most salient requirements for international educational research is the use of comparable measures. For the comparison of student performance across countries the use of item response theory (IRT) scaling techniques facilitates the collection of cross-nationally comparable measures. But there is also a need for valid and comparable…