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…

With increasing reliance being placed on the results of their surveys, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recognized a need for these survey results to be valid and reliable. As part of the work of the Statistical Analysis Group in Education (SAGE), an effort was undertaken to investigate validity and reliability in survey…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

Early detection and measurement of the intensity of childhood depression are important concerns for those treating depressed children. To examine issues of childhood depression, a review of the research was conducted which focused on: (1) childhood depression scales and their effectiveness; (2) correlates and antecedents of childhood depression;…

The Computer Attitude Scale (CAS) is a Likert-type instrument consisting of 30 items which present positively and negatively worded statements of attitudes toward computers and the use of computers. The CAS was subjected to three validation studies. The first study examined the reliability and factorial validity of the CAS and its subscales. The…

A study involving 29 teachers and 21 teacher educators was conducted to determine whether differences occur between the two groups on a cut-score study of the National Teacher Examination (NTE) Professional Knowledge Test. The 50 professionals were the judges for a validation and cut-score study prior to implementing use of the NTE for initial…