A study was designed to investigate the validity and reliability of the adult Career Concerns Inventory, which assesses career concerns of adults of any age and occupation. Subjects, 4 male and 165 female students (ages 23 to 62) enrolled in the graduate nursing program at a southern university, were administered the adult Career Concerns…

The stability of intelligence test scores over time was examined for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). Subjects included 64 children aged 6-16, who had been administered the WISC-R during prior evaluations. These students had been referred because of academic difficulties. One-third of the sample had taken the test…

A study was conducted to determine whether counting correct word sequences is a valid measure of written expression for use in a formative evaluation system for elementary students. A correct word sequence was defined as two adjacent, correctly spelled words that were acceptable within the context of the phrase to a native speaker of the English…

Summarized in this report are the activities undertaken in the development of the Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC) for the National Center for Education Statistics' use in coding transcripts of high school students. Fifty-two secondary school course catalogs selected from those collected in the High School and Beyond study…

Holistic evaluation, defined as the grading of an entire piece of writing without tallying or correcting specific errors, is discussed as preferable to discrete point testing or objective measures in assessing writing proficiency of English as a second language (ESL) students. The assessment process, in which the papers are evaluated as excellent,…

This paper evaluates the magnitude of the total error in estimates of the difference between an examinee's domain score and the cutoff score. An observed score based on a random sample of items from the domain, and an estimated cutoff score derived from a judgmental standard setting procedure are assumed. The work of Brennan and Lockwood (1980) is…

This paper discusses some means by which one might answer the question of "What makes problem solving hard?" In order to facilitate the investigations required to answer this question, a model of problem solving is needed. From some simulated solutions to a physics problem, several problem solving processes used by students are…

Since Upshur's (1969) original paper describing a picture-description test of oral communication ability, four empirical studies have been completed in which variants of the tests have been used. From these studies considerable new information on the tests' reliability and validity has become available. Indications are that the reliability is…

A Children's Health Locus of Control Scale (CHLOCS), consisting of 20 items with three subscales (powerful others, internal control, chance control) was developed previously by Parcel and Myer to facilitate measurement of the Internal-External Construct relative to children's health behavior. The present study used two samples of children in…

The Personal Profile System (PPS) is a self-referent device to measure behavioral responses of individuals on the dimensions of dominance, inducement of others, steadiness, and compliance. The PPS booklet contains: (1) a measurement device which generates scores for each dimension, (2) graphs for plotting obtained scores, (3) directions for…

This report investigates an area of uncertainty in using the Angoff method for setting standards, namely whether or not a judge's conceptualizations of borderline group performance are realistic. Ratings are usually made with reference to the performance of this hypothetical group, therefore the Angoff method's success is dependent on this point.…

An extensive search of the literature and existing programs was undertaken to identify instruments that were being used to measure school effectiveness. Twenty-four instruments are currently available and are critiqued in this publication. Each critique reports the format and components of the instrument, its intended purpose and uses, reliability…

To provide an assessment of current instruments being used by communication scholars, investigators examined and identified the most frequently used instruments that had been published in the past five years in the nine major speech communication journals. Each article was examined for the identification of the instruments used, constructs…

Three features of High School and Beyond (HS&B) provide rare opportunities for examining the quality of the responses of high school students to group-administered questionnaires: (1) many identical or similar items also were asked in questionnaires completed by about 6,500 of the students' parents; (2) high school transcripts containing…

Criterion-referenced evaluation (CRE) describes achievement in performance terms, whereas norm-referenced evaluation (NRE) compares the performance of one individual to that of others with respect to a given evaluation instrument. Vocational educators who base their programs on behaviorism commonly evaluate student performance from a CRE…