Differential responses to Female and Male Lawyer scale items on the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) were analyzed for 67 male and 35 female law students. The results are discussed. Because there is an implicit bias in maintaining separate sex scales, the author suggests the SCII should be considered an intermediate step to a combined…

The authors conducted a large-scale survey to confirm that the writing skills being assessed in the GRE® General Test can be linked to writing tasks that were judged to be important by graduate faculty from a variety of subject areas and across a wide range of institutions at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The results obtained in this…

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge. The material is organized into five units: (1) introduction to measurement theory; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) item analysis in test development; and (5) test scoring and…

A frame of reference for studying culture in middle schools was developed. Items for the Middle School Description Survey (MSDS), which was designed to test elements of the ideal middle school culture, were created based on middle school advocacy literature. The items were conceptually categorized according to E. H. Schein's (1985) cultural…

Undertaken at the request of the U.S. Employment Service (USES), this study assesses the validity and fairness of the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB). The U.S. Department of Labor is considering whether to promote the use of the GATB throughout the USES to screen many of the 19 million persons passing through the system annually in search of…

In the past several years, numerous educational climate instruments and questionnaires have been developed. One such instrument is the Charles F. Kettering (CFK) School Climate Profile, a popular measure of school climate that is widely used to gather data for administrative planning and curriculum revision. The instrument is patterned on the…

This study examined efficacy of different story collection procedures with normally developing (N=10) and language disordered (N=6) preschool children. Factor analyses probed such possible interfering factors as home vs. school environments, familiarity of the story requester, coaxing cues, stimulus structure, and presence of such props as dolls…

This report reviews and evaluates the tradition of assessing early literacy with formal tests. It begins with a historical account of the readiness movement, focusing on the development of formal measures of early literacy and tracing the development of the movement into the 1980s. Next, the paper analyzes in depth tests that are currently…

Based on material prepared for the California Assessment Program, an argument in favor of authentic assessment is presented, and authentic assessment is contrasted with traditional standardized tests. An assessment is authentic when student performance on intellectual tasks is directly examined. Comparatively, traditional assessment relies on…

A study involving 234 Texas college students was undertaken to develop and test the validity and reliability of an instrument designed to measure college students' attitudes toward alcohol. Special attention was given to the content and construct validity of the instrument. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 24 years. The mapping sentence served as…

A study investigated the reliability and validity of the partial dictation test, a combination of dictation and cloze procedure, to measure foreign language listening comprehension. Subjects were 78 students of English as a Foreign Language in the second year of high school in Spain. Students listened to a passage from a commercial reader three…

Increasing emphasis is being given to the construct of course structure in educational research. The Course Structure Inventory (CSI) was designed to measure this construct as a unitary dimension made up of student attitudes toward varying degrees and kinds of structure (ACS). In addition to measuring ACS, the CSI has the added advantage of…

Several investigators, using the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), have concluded that masculine is the desired sex role of males and females. Other investigators have suggested that some of the feminine BSRI items are undesirable. In order to determine if this masculine ideal might be due to the nature of the BSRI feminine items (more undesirable…

The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test (BG), a test of visual-motor integration, is a screening device used to investigate school-related factors that may produce poor academic achievement and learning disabilities. Because BG test stimuli are not obviously related to classroom content, and because BG scores are frequently offered as evidence of…

In order to collect the necessary information on various practices and devices used in school climate assessment, 22 of the 39 school improvement projects mentioned in the Miles and Kaufman directory of effective schools programs were selected for a survey. A questionnaire was used to collect the primary data. Each program was asked for copies of…