The Health Teaching Self-Efficacy (HTSE) Scale was devised to measure perceived deficits in ability at pretest and changes in self-efficacy in response to intervention. HTSE was tested on 31 school health teachers and was found to be highly reliable and internally consistent. (MDM)

In 1994 the Federation of State Medical Boards and the National Board of Medical Examiners instituted a three-step U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). Step one of the USMLE may be vulnerable to legal challenge on the basis of minority group bias and lack of construct validity. (SLD)

American educators are participating in a harmful, unwinnable contest--the score-boosting game. Standardized tests yield an inaccurate picture of school staff's instructional practices. Administrators should provide assessment-literacy training, brief educational policymakers, encourage autonomous parent groups, analyze test items, and create…

This paper describes the testing and refinement of an instrument for identifying and measuring Problem Formulation and Resolution (PFR) in online asynchronous discussions (OADs). The instrument was used to analyse a transcript of an OAD designed specifically for PFR with 30 participants in an undergraduate course for teachers in training. Results…

Health assessments are required for entrance into child care, Head Start, and preschool programs. However, state and federal screening and documentation mandates vary, and programs create their own forms for keeping required data on file. Inconsistent recording formats present challenges for primary care providers who must document each child's…

This paper describes a study evolving out of a collaboration between university researchers, special educators, classroom teachers, speech pathologists, and division-level administrators who were responding to a call from provincial administrators concerned with meeting the needs of children with reading disabilities. The primary goal of the study…

Demonstration programs and social experiments are often subject to sophisticated, controlled evaluations. An important factor that is not subject to control, and sometimes even goes unobserved, is overall program site quality. Site quality can be observed in process evaluations, but these tend to be expensive. This paper describes an alternative…

The purpose of this study was to develop scales to assess instrumental help seeking, executive help seeking, perceived benefits of help seeking, and avoidance of help seeking and to examine their psychometric properties by conducting factor and reliability analyses. As this is the first attempt to examine the latent structures underlying the…

For a number of years, the dominant approach to measuring individual differences in how people respond to interpersonal conflict has been the dual-concerns model, which assesses five broad conflict styles said to result from one's standing on two underlying dimensions: concern for self and concern for other. This article describes the development…

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) to address research questions in 2 subfields of behavioral science: cancer prevention and control (e.g., determinants of cancer screening adherence) and behavioral oncology (e.g., determinants of psychosocial adjustment among cancer patients or…

The authors describe a potential disconnect between research and practice in literacy assessment and instruction. They organize discussion around professionally recognized standards for the evaluation of educational assessments and assessment practices. These standards address both technical aspects of tests (e.g., validity; reliability;…

There is a tendency in the literature to characterize linking as equating done somewhat less rigorously. The ambiguity of this conception can lead to confusion amongst policy-makers and members of the public and can result in the proliferation of comparability myths. As the constructs assessed by two tests decrease in similarity, so the difference…

The pressure on academic institutions to develop sustainable programs is felt both internally and externally. Owing to shrinking operating budgets, universities will only support programs that relate directly to their mission and that are financially viable. External expectations come from funding agencies that typically require institutions to be…

Assessment has since taken center stage in higher education. Over two-thirds of the states have mandated assessment to document student performance, and many states have initiated performance-based funding strategies. Most assessment efforts are local, including those reported in the special issue of "Teaching Sociology," and most efforts use…

Plans are described for creating a Graduate Record Examination (GRE) test for the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. Previous work showed that a quantitative measure for the STEM disciplines exacerbated group differences beyond those reflected in the current GRE General Test. A test development approach is…