The North Carolina End-of-Grade Testing Program is based on the assessment of higher level skills in the context of specific subject-area content. These tests inform students, parents, the community, and educators about the achievement of North Carolina students in grades three through eight in given areas. This report describes the development…

Two editions of the Verbal and Mathematical portions of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were used to study differential speededness and differential omission and the relationships among differential item functioning (DIF), differential omission, and item difficulty for Asian Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and females in a total sample exceeding…

A popular method of analyzing test items for differential item functioning (DIF) is to compute a statistic that conditions samples of examinees from different populations on an estimate of ability. This conditioning or matching by ability is intended to produce an appropriate statistic that is sensitive to true differences in item functioning,…

Using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, this study examined the effects of 11 learning strategies variables, ability, and gender on the verbal and mathematics Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of approximately 300 black high school seniors. The students took the SAT during the fall of the 1989-90 school year. Learning…

A two-dimensional, compensatory item response model and a unidimensional model were fitted to the reading and mathematics items in the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised for a sample of 1,000 adults aged 20-39 years. Multidimensional information theory predicts that if the unidimensional abilities can be represented as vectors in…

This report presents the mathematics assessment results from the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The assessment included nearly 250,000 fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students attending approximately 10,000 schools across the nation and the states. Students' performance is categorized into three achievement levels:…

Assessment cannot be considered separately from teaching and learning because assessments are the motivation for both teacher and student. This book explores a new system of assessment, not just modified tests. It describes for people inside and outside the educational community the kinds of assessment frequently mentioned in talk about…

In an effort to determine the validity of placement tests used at Rancho Santiago College (Santa Ana, California), for placing students into mathematics courses, a study was conducted comparing the course performance of students who met test cut-off scores ("eligible" to take the course) with students who did not meet the cut-off scores…

The conceptual framework for the instructionally sensitive assessment that guided the analyses of data from the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) are described. The intellectual rationale for the project effort and the current draft version of the guiding conception of "instructionally sensitive psychometrics" are discussed,…

Analyses for results of a series of studies examining intercorrelations among a set of as many as p+1 variables are presented. Several estimators of a pooled or average correlation vector and its variances are derived for cases in which some studies do not report complete correlation matrices. A test of the homogeneity (consistency) of the…

The issue of test-item selection in support of decision making in adaptive testing is considered. The number of items needed to make a decision is compared for two approaches: selecting items from an item pool that are most informative at the decision point or selecting items that are most informative at the examinee's ability level. The first…

This book supports constructive discussion about assessment and provides concrete directions for change. The 10 chapters outline many of the difficulties associated with current standardized testing. While most educators refer to the new non-standardized test efforts as alternative assessments, this type of assessment is increasingly being called…

This bulletin is intended to provide a brief summary of the California Assessment Program (CAP) testing results for the 1986-87 school year. General comments regarding testing in San Diego (California), commonly asked questions, and school- and district-level results are provided. Tabulated results cover mean scale scores for grades 3, 6, and 8…

The attitudes and self-beliefs revealed in science education can affect students' achievements. Several studies have found that students' self-beliefs are significantly associated with achievement outcomes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between their attitudes and self-beliefs and science achievements based on TIMSS…

A study involving 716 male and 1,113 female first-year students admitted to the University of Delaware in the fall of 1985 was conducted to investigate the differential performance of men and women on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Data collected included SAT math scores; gender; and number of years of high school…