Understanding the behavior of those evaluating a speech is important for a complete understanding of the public communication process. Ratings of public speaking were submitted to a Rasch analysis to determine whether objective measurement can create and maintain a standard of speech evaluation. Data used were 1,022 ratings of 168 speeches given…

The Social Skills Diagnostic Screen (SSDS), developed by the Fort McMurray School District in Alberta, Canada, in 1991-92, is a checklist which may be used by teachers, parents, counsellors, and students to ascertain a student's level of social development. The SSDS may also serve as a tool to specify or clarify specific social skills with which…

Because a cumulative score is not computed for the Urban Teacher Selection Interview, item rankings do not appear to be operationally related to the overall ranking and final categorization of teacher education candidates. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which, during the final selection process, the interviewers ranked…

The curriculum-embedded procedures used to construct, validate, and refine assessment tasks for mathematics are described and discussed. Curriculum-embedded assessment places assessment tasks in the day-to-day context of the classroom. The test of a curriculum-embedded task is whether it could be regarded as curriculum material per se. In…

Portfolios, with their associated exhibitions, will be the heart of the New Standards assessment system that is being developed. It will be necessary to combine the functions of portfolios as measurement tools and as tools for instruction and learning. As a beginning, the New Standards project has examined how teachers are already using portfolios…

Methods of adjusting cut scores used in placement decisions are examined empirically. Admission and performance variables are used to study alternate methods of adjusting cut scores for placement in standard and accelerated rhetoric courses in a large university setting, with the predicted variable being success or failure as measured by…

Designed to assist community college instructors in the difficult task of grading students, this seven-part guidebook provides philosophical, theoretical and practical advice. Section I covers common problems associated with grading, the need for grades, and the link between grades and subsequent performance. Section II, "Limitations of Grades,"…

The semi-structured interview was investigated as a content-based assessment designed to take into account the complexity of teaching. A semi-structured interview licensing assessment for secondary mathematics teachers was developed and tested by the Connecticut State Department of Education. The scoring system converted the open-ended verbal…

Rank ordering examinees is an easier task for judges than is awarding numerical ratings. A measurement model for rankings based on Rasch's objectivity axioms provides linear, sample-independent and judge-independent measures. Estimates of examinee measures are obtained from the data set of rankings, along with standard errors and fit statistics.…

This manual provides screening guidelines for rural preschool and kindergarten programs and describes the development of a model Early Screening Program (ESP) that involves nine child stations and two parent stations. Screening stations developed for assessment included: (1) gross motor; (2) visual motor; (3) visual perception; (4) auditory…

This study used generalizability theory and other statistical concepts to assess the application of the Angoff method to setting cutoff scores on two professional certification tests. A panel of ten judges gave pre- and post-feedback Angoff probability ratings of items of two forms of a professional certification test, and another panel of nine…

A major issue facing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing Assessment is its relationship with the most frequently encountered measurement practices among State Education Agencies (SEAs) and Local Education Agencies (LEAs). Should NAEP conduct its assessments in a fashion that represents how things should be, or reflect…

In a question and answer format, this guide for parents discusses important issues about standardized reading tests, including the following: (1) scoring systems are obscure; (2) grade level equivalency scores are educationally inaccurate and misleading to child and parent; (3) standardized reading tests are meant to compare groups and not to…

This paper deals with test fairness regarding a test consisting of two parts: (1) a "common" section, taken by all students; and (2) a "variable" section, in which some students may answer a different set of questions from other students. For example, a test taken by several thousand students each year contains a common multiple-choice portion and…

A methodology for investigating the influence of correction-for-guessing directions and formula scoring on test performance was studied. Experts in the test content field used a judgmental item appraisal system to estimate the knowledge of the minimally competent candidate (MCC) and to predict those items that the MCC would omit on the test under…