Warns against the declining standards of the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history examination and the AP program. Focuses on the problems that occur in maintaining high standards and the practive of teaching to the test in AP courses. Discusses who does grade and who should grade the AP examinations. (CMK)

Undergraduates completed the new Civic Attitudes and Skills Questionnaire designed to measure attitudes, skills, and behavioral intentions that might be affected by service learning participation. Factor analyses were used to define six scales. The scales' reliability and validity were found to be adequate. (EV)

Following a review of the literature on anomie and academic dishonesty at the university level, this paper reports on a survey of 300 undergraduate business students in Australia which found the newly developed measure both reliable and valid for measuring actual cheating and plagiarism. Concludes that universities need to foster development of an…

Examines the validity of large-scale educational assessment, suggesting that construct validity is insufficient for assuming an achievement measure's internal validity and that the uses of assessment results affect external validity. Discusses the role of learning theory in large-scale assessment, purposes of large-scale assessment, item types and…

Accommodations are test-administration changes that do not change the underlying construct being measured. The Individuals with Disabilities legislation and regulations provide little guidance on implementing assessment accommodations for students with learning disabilities. Certain research-based checklists or rating scales help link…

Used an empirically based strategy to develop a measure of ethnic identity among American Indian adolescents, focusing on degree to which respondents identified with Indian culture and with White culture. Exploratory factor analysis examined the structure of ethnic identity, and resulting models were tested with confirmatory factor analysis.…

Compares English programs in schools that were "Beating the Odds" (that is, whose students were performing unusually well on locally important tests when compared with students in schools serving similar populations) with English programs whose students were performing more typically. Discusses five features of the successful programs. (SG)

Considers how standards and high-stakes testing corrupts instruction. Notes that the cyclic nature of scope-and-sequence standards, isolated instructional practices, and isolated items on tests is a closed system that has no authentic purpose beyond the academic hallways of schools. Concludes that reading and writing are individual acts at the…

Counselor educators need to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness in training new counselors; however, currently few valid or reliable measures exist for assessing educators' impact. The authors describe the development of such an instrument, the Counseling Skills Scale. They began by revising an existing scale and then they solicited…

Approximately 1,700 English language learners (ELLs) and former ELL students, in Grades 4 and 10, were tested using both an English-language (Stanford Achievement Test, 9th ed.) and a Spanish-language (Aprenda, 2nd ed.) achievement test. Their performances on the two tests were contrasted. The results showed that ELL students, for the most part,…

Initial validation was sought for the Life-Challenges Questionnaire-Teen Form, a 120-item youth-risk assessment tool. The questionnaire was administered to 99 students enrolled in an adolescent detention facility and a comparison group of 305 students attending high school. The survey items included correlates of youth violence and categorized…

Objective: To evaluate the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in a U.S. national population sample of children and adolescents, develop normative scoring bands, and test the association of high-scoring groups with service contacts or use for mental health reasons. Method: An Americanized version of the Strengths and Difficulties…

Using the Career Key as a criterion measure, he validity of the Strong Interest Explorer was tested with a sample of Latino junior high school and senior high school students. A total of 85 Hispanic youth were administered the Strong Interest Explorer and the Career Key in counterbalanced order. Separate correlational analyses were conducted for…

This paper presents the rationale, development, and psychometric status of a non-clinical self-report measure for the general population (GP) ? including students ? derived from the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) and hence termed the GP-CORE. In contrast to the CORE-OM, the GP-CORE does not comprise items…

Four studies on the development and validation of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Knowledge and Attitudes Scale for Heterosexuals (LGB-KASH) were conducted. Exploratory factor analysis of an initial item pool yielded 5 factors assessing internalized affirmativeness, civil rights attitudes, knowledge, religious conflict, and hate--indicating that…