The measurement of personality characteristics via the analysis of verbal communication is of interest due to its unobtrusive, accessible, and objective nature. The Mahl Speech Disturbance Indices, a procedure for assessing anxiety on the basis of speech disturbance patterns, was examined to assess the nature and reliability of the indices and…

The scoring scheme of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is studied, as well as techniques for estimating its reliability. NAEP data are collected on students of age 13 in the fall, age 9 in the winter, and age 17 in the spring. The scoring task, involving hand scoring of open-ended items, may vary between 25,000 responses to…

As an alternative for or adjunct to paper-and-pencil tests for predicting personnel performance, the United States Air Force studied the use of peer ratings as an evaluative tool. Purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric characteristics of peer ratings among Air Force basic trainees. Peer ratings were obtained from more than 27,000…

A theory was conceived to explain student, teacher, and classroom environment characteristics or constructs, which may influence student attitudes toward school and various subjects. A questionnaire representing the constructs, the Inventory of Affective Aspects of Schooling (IAAS), was developed and administered to 601 students in grade 4. Factor…

The English language portions of appropriate levels of the Language Assessment Scales (LAS) were administered to 193 English-speaking monolingual elementary school students. The students were aged 5-14, and had average reading achievement scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. On the basis of the publisher's norms, maturational trends in scores…

The Situational Self-statement and Affective State Inventory, a research inventory comprised of five hypothetical situations involving interpersonal conflict, and a series of self-report measures of psychopathology were administered to 224 undergraduates to examine the correlational relationship between specific cognitions and affective states in…

This paper describes the development, utility, and validity of the Situational Self-statement and Affective State Inventory (SSASI), a research inventory designed to assess cognitions and affects across a variety of five hypothetical situations. Each situation describes a realistic incident involving interpersonal conflict, principally criticism…

This study examined the effects of pretraining Chicano and non-Chicano seventh-grade students using items parallel to those appearing on tests. The sample was 44% Chicano and 56% non-Chicano. Prior to instruction on factors and primes, all seventh-grade students in a school were given an Arithmetic Reasoning Test and a Missing Words Test as…

Using estimates of item ease and item discrimination, procedures are provided for computing estimates of the reliability and percentage of failing scores for tests assembled from these items. Two assumptions are made: that the average item coefficient will be approximately equal to the average of the estimated coefficients and that the score…

The primary goal of this review is to acquaint developmental psychologists who have had little experience in the study of individual differences in cognition with some of the basic rules that govern this type of research. A second goal is to stimulate researchers to consider the potential benefits of studying differences among individuals whose…

Generalizability theory was applied to the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF), an instrument commonly employed to assess reflection-impulsivity in children, in order to analyze the dependability of the MFF at four grade levels: second, third, fourth, and fifth. The MFF was individually administered to 114 boys. A completely crossed, two-facet…

Two studies investigated examiner scoring agreement on the Oral Vocabulary, Draw-A-Design, and Draw-A-Child subtests of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities. In study one, ten examiners scored four randomly selected normal children's protocols. Unanimous agreement occurred on scores for 52% of the Oral Vocabulary responses, 39% of the…

The Classroom Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS) was developed to provide school psychologists and educators with a measure of learning-related classroom behaviors of elementary school students. The initial item pool consisted of 100 behavioral statements reflecting learning-related behaviors such as attention and persistence. These behaviors were…

The Ohio State Instructional Preference Scale (OSIPS) was designed to identify persons suited or not suited for teaching. After identifying six areas covered in general secondary methods courses, two researchers independently constructed a series of statements representing attitudes, ideas, and dispositions about each area and jointly constructed…

The Pittsburgh Adjustment Survey Scales were developed to meet the need for the objective evaluation of the social behavior of elementary school-age boys using the observations of classroom teachers. An initial item pool was reduced to 94 items by an extreme-group procedure (202 subjects). A factor analysis (209 subjects) of the inventory resulted…