When the drive to develop and administer tests comes from a public call for accountability in a profession, from the government's response to this call, or from politicians attempting to identify a hot issue, it may be said that the test must first have political validity in order to be implemented. Only after this political validity has been…

This paper presents the results of a development and psychometric evaluation of the Addiction Counselor Evaluation Scale (ACES), an instrument designed for the evaluation and supervision of entry level Alcoholism and Other Drug Abuse (AODA) counselors based on the Technical Assistance Publication Series (TAP) 21. The domains of the competence of…

Current practices for assessment of language in bilingual students frequently involve the use of tests translated from English to the target language or tests designed for, and normed on, monolingual people. This Digest explains why these common approaches are not well suited for a bilingual population and provides guidance regarding more suitable…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) seeks to include all students in the United States in the sampling frame from which students are selected to participate in the assessment. However, some students with disabilities (SWD) are either unable to take NAEP tests under standard testing conditions or are unable to perform at their…

In three lectures, Benjamin D. Wright of the University of Chicago introduces the Rasch model and its basic concepts. The first lecture, March 30, 1994 discusses the model created by Georg Rasch, a Danish mathematician, which Dr. Wright initially saw as merely a way to make raw scores into measures. Eventually, the model developed into a…

In 1999, an external review was conducted of the indicators and methodology that the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCHEMS) had developed for "Measuring UP 2000: The State-by-State Report Card for Higher Education." The principal purpose of these tests was to understand better the relationships among the indicators and…

Creative leadership calls for leaders to make full use of the analytical as well as the intuitive mind. This paper argues that leadership-preparation programs must therefore provide opportunities for the development of the leader's potential. The paper describes a pilot program implemented by the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural…

Jungian measures have proven extremely popular, selling more than three million copies per year for use in various types of counseling. This study investigated the construct validity of scores from an alternative measure of Jungian personality, the Personal Preferences Self-Description Questionnaire (PPSDQ) (B. Thompson, 1996). Forms of the PPSDQ…

Scholars from psychology and education describe how the new rules of measurement work and how they differ from the old rules. The collection provides an integrated and comprehensive reference source concerned with contemporary issues and approaches in testing and measurement. The chapters are: (1) "Issues in the Measurement of Cognitive…

With an increasing number of cases currently coming to the courts' attention to examine the conditions under which educational and psychological testing practices violate one's constitutional rights, this article considers the responses from school systems, professional organizations, the Federal Government, school psychologists, and the testing…

Discusses the different strategies employed by three practical nonmetric multidimensional scaling algorithms using Monte Carlo techniques. (Author/RK)

This paper discusses the Lens Model' approach to the analysis of subject performance in multiple-cue judgment tasks embedded in probabilistic environments. (Author/RK)

A number of empirical studies are suggested to answer certain questions in connection with flexilevel tests. (MS)

Modifications of administration and item arrangement of a conventional test can force a match between item difficulty levels and the ability level of the examinee. Although different examinees take different sets of items, the scoring method provides comparable scores for all. Furthermore, the test is self-scoring. These advantages are obtained…

This study evaluates the usefulness of conceptualizing intraindividual stability as a personality construct. The feasibility of developing a psychometric scale which might be used to reliably predict individual stability in self-description, self-concept, and other behavioral domains is assessed. (MS)